Rolex Planet Visionaries Season 6 Brings New Voices to the Climate Conversation

There are few people better suited to talk through what it actually takes to protect a wild place than Alex Honnold, and for the sixth year running, Rolex and Sony Music Entertainment are handing him the microphone again. Planet Visionaries returned for its sixth season on September 22, 2026, premiering during New York Climate Week with an opening episode built around one of the more remarkable finds in recent conservation photography: the first underwater images ever captured of pink river dolphins raiding fishing nets in the Amazon.

That discovery belongs to Thomas Peschak, the National Geographic Explorer and conservation photographer who spent 396 days tracing the Amazon from its Andean headwaters, at roughly 6,000 meters, down to the Atlantic. Peschak’s journey through one of the world’s most biodiverse river basins also took him into a Bolivian national park and Indigenous territory he hopes to see protected, and his images do something data alone rarely manages: they make the stakes legible at a glance.

The rest of Season 6 moves just as widely. Across 20 episodes, Honnold sits down with National Geographic Explorer Anna Rathmann of the Jane Goodall Institute USA, Billion Oyster Project co-founder Pete Malinowski, and Honnold Foundation Executive Director Emily Teitsworth, tracing conservation work from the Amazon to New York City. The season also lands squarely on an anniversary: 2026 marks 50 years since the launch of what’s now called the Rolex Awards, formerly the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, and all five of this year’s Laureates — Pardis Sabeti, Rachel Ikemeh, Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, Binbin Li, and Farwiza Farhan — appear as guests. Krithi K. Karanth, named the 2026 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year for her work reducing wildlife-human conflict across 100 reserves in India, is featured as well.

Six seasons in, Planet Visionaries has settled into a clear identity: less a brand podcast than a documentary series that happens to be backed by one. Past guests have included oceanographer Sylvia Earle, actor Mark Ruffalo, conservation photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, and conservationist Kris Tompkins — a roster that reads more like a who’s-who of working conservationists than a marketing rollout. The series is produced by Sony Music Entertainment in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, which launched in 2019 and now spans more than 30 partner organizations working across oceans, landscapes, and science and technology.

New episodes are released every Tuesday through Rolex’s YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. For a franchise this many seasons deep, Season 6 still finds new ground — proof that there’s no shortage of people doing work worth this kind of attention.