Two scientists from South America won the 2025 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement on Feb. 11 for their work on the often-overlooked connection between human societies and the natural world.
The winners, Argentinian ecologist Sandra Díaz and Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Brondízio, will share a $250,000, marking the first time individuals from South America have received the Tyler award, also referred to as the “environmental Nobel Prize.” Previous recipients include Jane Goodall, Johan Rockström and Michael Mann.
Among several significant contributions, Díaz and Brondízio co-chaired a major United Nations-backed report on biodiversity, showing that 1 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity.
“Eduardo Brondízio’s research has illuminated the vital role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in conservation, while Sandra Díaz’s work has been instrumental in reshaping how biodiversity is conceptualized and valued in policy discussions around the globe,” Julia Marton-Lefèvre, chair of the Tyler Prize, said in a statement.
Much of Brondízio’s work explores how differences in social organization impacts the environment in the Amazon. For millennia, Indigenous groups managed and created the Amazon Rainforest we know today, he said in a press conference. “It is what we call an anthropogenic forest.”
Now, the fast-growing cities of the Brazilian Amazon, where more than 80% of the region’s population now lives in largely precarious conditions, is reshaping the rainforest, he added.
Díaz approaches human-nature interaction from the perspective of plants. “Today there is hardly any portion of the biosphere that doesn’t bear the stamp of humans. So, we can say that today, nature is indeed human nature,” Díaz said at the conference.
Modern society is built on a false idea that humans and nature are separate, Díaz said, with systems prioritizing profit, often short-term gains, for a privileged few at the expense of both people and the environment. She said these decisions are reflected in plant life and environmental problems.
“Climate change, the biodiversity crisis and the outrageous inequality among different people are not separate issues but rather different symptoms of the same underlying problem,” she added.
Osvaldo Sala, an ecologist and professor at Arizona State University, U.S., called it a “great day” for South America in an email to Mongabay, adding that their research “offers an extraordinary novel path forward for humanity.”
Mercedes Bustamante, a biologist renowned for her research in the Brazilian Cerrado, told Mongabay in an email that the prize serves as “an incentive for researchers and institutions in a region that is home to several megadiverse countries and immense cultural diversity.”
“In this context of concerning political shifts, the voices of the Global South will be even more crucial to ensuring diverse perspectives carry weight and are taken into account,” Bustamante added.
Banner image: Ecologist Sandra Díaz and anthropologist Eduardo Brondízio won the 2025 Tyler Prize. Image is a compilation of photos by Diego Augusto Lima (left) and James Vavrek (right).
