A chemical biologist and conservationist, Rosa Vasquez Espinoza is one of five laureates of the Rolex Awards this year. It’s a landmark year for the Rolex Awards: originally known as the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, the initiative was launched in 1976 to mark 50 years of the Oyster, the first waterproof wristwatch produced by Rolex. The award is part of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, and as such is bestowed on individuals spearheading projects that help to preserve habitats and species. This year, all five laureates are women.

Get to know Rosa Vasquez Espinoza, a Rolex Awards laureate

Vásquez Espinoza, who grew up between the Peruvian Andes and the rainforest, is the founder and executive director of Amazon Research Internacional. In her work, she sets out to safeguard biodiversity and to empower communities across the Amazon basin.

Vásquez Espinoza’s research into stingless bees – one of the oldest species of bees around the world, and one she first honed in on in 2020 – led to a legal case resulting in the insect’s protection. Prized for generations for the medicinal properties of their honey, stingless bee populations have been in decline due to deforestation, climate change, pesticide use and habitat degradation. Amazon Research Internacional established the first scientific link between the decline and deforestation. The 2026 Rolex Award will now underscore Vásquez Espinoza’s work on expanding an Indigenous-led corridor of protected bee habitats.

We spoke with the conservationist to find out more.

Wallpaper*: You grew up between the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon rainforest. How did that upbringing shape the way you approach the natural world?

Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Moving between the Andes, the Amazon and the Peruvian capital Lima taught me that nature was never just a backdrop. Nature shapes how we eat, heal, build, remember and how we even come to understand the world. This upbringing also taught me that there are many ways to know a landscape. Indigenous knowledge, learned first through my grandmother and over time through various Indigenous leaders, reveals relationships built over generations of observation and a kinship with the natural world. Meanwhile, science allowed me to understand and explore nature at a molecular level beyond what our eyes can typically see. My work today sits between those perspectives. I am interested in not just understanding a species or a compound, but rather how the interconnection of a wider system works, and what may be lost culturally and ecologically if it disappears.

W*: What did you discover about these bees, particularly their honey and its medicinal properties, that made you realise they needed a different kind of protection?

RVE: Stingless bee honey is a reflection of the flowers and forest that surround the bees. It’s basically a concentrated, delicious and liquid version of the Amazon rainforest. Through traditional knowledge, we learned that this medicinal honey has been used for generations to treat a variety of conditions, including ulcers, inflammation, burns, eye cataracts, even infertility. Chemical studies confirmed this through a wide range of promising bioactive molecules identified. The Amazon has faced a long history of extractivism and exploitation, with many of its natural resources serving the rest of the world without a direct way of contributing back to the land and people. However, conservation without sustainable economy does not last. Thus, Indigenous communities wanted to find a way to develop circular economies, in a way that respects their traditional knowledge, while also prioritising bee and rainforest health. That became fuel for us to advocate for a unique angle of protecting the bees.

W*: What did it take to turn what you once described as a ‘naïve and stubborn idea’ – giving Amazonian stingless bees legal rights – into a reality, and what could this precedent mean for other species, do you think?

RVE: It required building bridges of communication and empathy between groups that haven’t typically connected and collaborated: Indigenous communities, scientists, lawyers, storytellers, press and local authorities. Our efforts to spearhead the recognition of legal rights of Amazonian stingless bees was born from Indigenous perspectives that believe that stingless bees have the right to exist and live in healthy forests.

For us, if the Amazon is healthy, so are we. And if we are healthy, so is the forest. Thus, the bee as an important ancestor, teacher, and pollinator, is an essential life form that deserves to thrive. We faced many challenges in the process, but we dream of a future where bees and the Amazon are flourishing over the next decades and century, so that the children of our grandchildren can still enjoy the rivers, forests, flora and fauna that we grew up with.

We shine a light on life forms that often get a backseat. Our work has now ignited a new global movement for Bee Rights, which we will be leading; [it includes] several countries with interest in replicating our framework for the protection and regeneration of their own wild bees.

W*: Your next ambition is to create an Indigenous-led Stingless Bee Conservation Corridor spanning Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil. What would success look like for the bees and the communities who depend on them, and what are the biggest challenges to making that vision a reality?

RVE: We imagine this corridor, which would be the first stingless bee corridor in the world, as a connected network of rainforest, wild bee nests, community-led bee sanctuaries, Indigenous knowledge and the flora and fauna that live in these territories. To us, success would mean healthy bee populations that restore the Amazon habitat while communities strengthen livelihoods, training younger generations and leading monitoring of the corridor themselves. The greatest challenges we face are fragmentation, deforestation and climate change, as well as the complexity of different local realities. Thus, this initiative is starting place by place, with a common vision but enough flexibility to belong to each community.

W*: This year marks 50 years of the Rolex Awards, and your Rolex Award will give you the opportunity to think beyond the short-term funding cycles that have been a bottleneck for your work. What does having that longer-term support change for you?

RVE: It allows us to work according to ecological time rather than grant time. Relationships with communities cannot be rushed, forests do not recover within a reporting cycle, and meaningful scientific monitoring requires years rather than months. Longer-term support means we can move beyond isolated interventions, training more communities and Indigenous scientists, gathering stronger evidence and adapting when conditions change. It also gives us the space to build systems that will endure without depending permanently on me or on one award. For me, that is the real opportunity, to turn an ambitious conservation project into lasting infrastructure for both biodiversity and community leadership.