Christiana Figueres has spent much of her life confronting the heaviest realities of the climate crisis, but in her latest honor, she finds herself stepping into the legacy of a woman who taught the world that hope is not a naive luxury—it is a necessary discipline. The former United Nations climate chief, who guided the 2015 Paris Agreement into existence, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Jane Goodall Earth Medal, a new award created by the Starmus Festival to recognize those who “unite science, courage and responsibility.” The news carries a bittersweet weight, as it arrives just months after Goodall’s passing in October 2025 at the age of 91. For Figueres, the timing feels almost poetic — an opportunity to carry forward a torch once held by a giant. The honor is not just for her political achievements, but for aligning herself with Goodall’s belief that humanity is at its best when it acts with empathy, integrity and an unflinching commitment to the truth. The medal, conceived by celebrated figures who saw in both women a resemblance of spirit, is meant to inspire a new generation of problem-solvers, just as Goodall once inspired so many through her decades of patient observation, unfailing gentleness and a radical kind of hope that never wavered, even when the evidence for hope seemed thin.
Goodall, the renowned primatologist and conservationist whose name became synonymous with the great apes of Gombe, remained a persistent voice of hope until her final days. She joined the Mongabay advisory council years ago, a role she held with the same gentle curiosity that defined her life’s work. Her loss left a gaping absence in the community of people who believe that science and wonder can coexist, that the intellectual and the emotional are not opposing forces but allies in the fight for a livable world. The decision to name the Earth Medal in her honor is a way of ensuring that her spirit remains active in that fight, not just as a memory, but as a call. Figueres, reflecting on the recognition, told Mongabay’s Mike DiGirolamo on the Newscast that Goodall was “an absolute giant” to her very last day. “And the fact that a medal has been made in her honor, and that I will debut that, is just an unbelievable honor,” she said. It is a moment that connects two women across generations and fields—one who revealed the secret lives of chimpanzees and showed the world our shared ancestry, and another who took on the intricate machinery of global politics to broker a deal for the planet’s future.
The Jane Goodall Earth Medal originated from a dynamic intersection of science and art. Astrophysicist Garik Israelian, co-founder of the Starmus Festival, revealed during the podcast that the idea first emerged from conversations among the festival’s advisory board members—most notably Brian May, the legendary guitarist of Queen and a celebrated astrophysicist, and Peter Gabriel, the iconic musician and human rights activist. May, through his foundation Save Me, has long campaigned against animal cruelty and habitat destruction, a cause close to Goodall’s own heart. Gabriel, meanwhile, has devoted decades to advocating for human rights across the globe. Together, they conceived the Earth Medal to shine a light on individuals who, like Goodall, unite the rigor of science with the courage to act on its findings and the responsibility to protect all forms of life. The medal will be presented at the upcoming Starmus Festival, which takes place from Oct. 17-22 in Spain. The festival itself, an international gathering dedicated to celebrating the intersections of science, space and the arts, provides a fitting backdrop for an honor named for a woman who never saw boundaries between disciplines—she was as comfortable in a lab coat as she was in a forest, reading the mysteries of nature with the same eyes she used to charm a room of diplomats or schoolchildren.
The theme of this year’s Starmus Festival is “The Search for Truth,” an ambitious title that carries a great deal of urgency in an era dominated by confusion and manipulation. Political ecologist Bram Buscher, a previous guest on the Mongabay Newscast, described this current moment as a “post-truth era,” where feelings often outweigh facts and repeated lies begin to feel like reality. Both Figueres and Israelian used their time on the podcast to dig into this phenomenon, pointing their fingers directly at the architecture of social media. These platforms, they argued, are engineered to maximize engagement above all else—their algorithms designed not to inform or educate, but to keep eyes on the screen for as long as possible, feeding users content that sparks outrage, division and fear. And in that environment, scientifically accurate content stands little chance against the visceral appeal of misinformation, which is crafted, often intentionally, to exploit emotional reflexes rather than appeal to rational thought. “We are swimming in both disinformation and misinformation all the time without even knowing it,” Figueres said. She went further, calling the expansion of misinformation an abuse of free speech—not because it silences people, but because it hijacks the very mechanisms we rely on to think clearly. She explained that the problem is not merely that these platforms exist, but that we have allowed them to become the primary battlefield for ideas. “The fact that we choose to consume more misinformation and disinformation than science-based, truth-based information is to me the root of the problem of why these companies do what they do with algorithms,” she added.
For Israelian, the path forward begins with education—and not just in a formal, institutional sense, but as a continuous, grassroots commitment to critical thinking. He argued that well-informed, knowledgeable people are far less susceptible to the siren call of conspiracy theories and fake news, not because they are somehow smarter than everyone else, but because they have developed the tools to question, to verify and to seek out evidence. “It’s much harder to lead very educated, very knowledgeable people to this route of using misinformation and … to inform them completely wrong things,” he said. But he acknowledged that education alone is not enough. The systems that profit from division must also be reined in. Israelian called for strict regulations on technology companies and their algorithms, demanding accountability and transparency from the platforms that have become the new town squares of our global community. “They should be under control,” he said flatly. His point is not to stifle free expression, but to recognize that freedom without responsibility is just another form of chaos. The algorithms may be lines of code, but they are written by people who make choices about what to amplify and what to suppress. And those choices, Israelian suggested, deserve scrutiny. There is something profoundly more difficult—and deeply important—about maintaining a healthy information ecosystem than simply building faster, shinier tools. It requires an ongoing societal negotiation about what we value, what we tolerate and what we are willing to demand from those who control our digital lives.
At its heart, the Jane Goodall Earth Medal is a reminder that hope and truth are not passive states—they are actions. Goodall earned her legacy not by avoiding the hard realities of habitat destruction, animal suffering or climate breakdown, but by facing them head-on, every day, without allowing despair to take root. Figueres, whose own career has been a long arc of negotiating against the clock of nature, seems to carry that same flame. She has spent her post-UN years traveling, speaking, and working with the explicit mission of bringing humanity back from the brink of collective action failure. And now, with this new honor, she stands as a bridge between two of the most pressing imperatives of our time: the need to save the natural world and the need to protect human sanity in the face of a fabricated media landscape. “The Search for Truth” may be the festival’s theme, but for Figueres and Israelian, it is also a challenge—a call to each of us to choose curiosity over convenience, evidence over comfort, and courage over conformity. Goodall’s legacy will no doubt continue to inspire that search, just as her memory guided the hands that sculpted this new prize. As the Starmus Festival approaches, those who gather in Spain will not only celebrate the achievements of science and art, but also reckon with the fact that the toughest truths are rarely found in headlines. They are found in the quiet, steady work of people who refuse to give up—who wake up every morning believing that the world can be better, and who act on that belief as if everything depends on it. Because it does. And perhaps that is the greatest lesson both Goodall and Figueres have to offer: that the search for truth is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is the most compassionate, most human, most courageous thing we can do.