October 6th 2026
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WellBeing Magazine
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Environmental scientist and polar explorer Tim Jarvis AM has built a career out of turning endurance into advocacy. From a faithful recreation of Shackleton’s 1916 survival journey to streaming live footage of retreating glaciers into UN climate talks, he uses adventure storytelling to make climate change tangible. This is his story.
“There’s something very powerful about seeing a piece of ice just gradually shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking back until finally, one day, it’s gone,” says Tim Jarvis AM, an environmental scientist and polar explorer.
Through his Antarctic expeditions, Jarvis has exposed the rapid, often irreversible effects of climate change on glaciers, using adventure-led storytelling to transform science into something people connect with and care about.
In 2015, Jarvis streamed footage from a mountaintop of a retreating glacier into the United Nations Climate Conference (COP21), showing world
leaders the tangible impacts of climate change. “My message was, what else are we going to lose?” says Jarvis. “Because I don’t think we’ll save those glaciers. I think the question is, do we use this canary in the coal mine as a prompt to actually lift our game?” Jarvis is also an environmental activist, filmmaker, speaker and adventurer who has made a career out of turning endurance into advocacy.
Based in South Australia, Jarvis is arguably best known for leading the 2013 Shackleton Epic expedition, where he undertook a painstaking
recreation of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 Antarctic journey. He did this to pay tribute to Shackleton’s leadership skills, while also spotlighting the impact of climate change on polar regions.
Jarvis has won awards including 2024 SA Australian of the Year and Australian Geographic Society Adventurer of the Year 2013. He’s also a
Member of the Order of Australia for services to environment, community and exploration.
Through his expeditions, filmmaking, public speaking and environmental leadership, Jarvis uses storytelling and extreme landscapes to remind us that what feels remote is actually deeply connected to our everyday lives.
Early years
Born in Manchester in the UK, Jarvis, now 60, spent several years living in Malaysia as a child, then several more in Singapore. Even from a young age, he had a sense that the natural world was fragile and needed to be protected.
“I recall, as a child from Malaysia, any car journey to go off on a holiday with my family involved driving through endless oil palm and rubber plantations,” says Jarvis. “And I remember saying at the time, as a 12-year-old, ‘Where’s all the nature in amongst all this?’ It really stuck with me, and I probably had that sense that nature was a little bit under pressure, even back then.”
Jarvis loved nature and being outdoors, so studied geography at the University of Brighton in the UK and later achieved a master’s degree in environmental science. Following university, Jarvis worked for an aid program in Guatemala’s Cuchumatanes mountains, building gravity-fed water systems for Mayan communities, which he described as “perhaps the most interesting year of my life”.
Jarvis moved to Australia at age 29 to work as a scientist, researching water issues in Australia’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin, in south-eastern Australia. “I found that I was dealing with so many lawyers,” recalls Jarvis. “I didn’t aspire to be one, but I felt I was dealing with so many of them around environmental issues that unless I could speak their language, I wasn’t really providing them with enough help.” Wanting to focus on making change through international relationships, Jarvis studied for another master’s degree, this time in environmental law.
In Shackleton’s footsteps
A major turning point for Jarvis came in 2013, when he led an authentic recreation of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s legendary 1916 survival journey, widely regarded as one of history’s greatest survival and endurance stories.
When Antarctic ice crushed their ship, Shackleton and his 28-man crew were stranded for months. With rescue unlikely, Shackleton and five companions made a perilous open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, then crossed the island’s uncharted, icy mountains to reach a whaling station and organise a rescue.
Jarvis and his team retraced this journey, sailing a replica 23-foot wooden boat roughly 1500km across one of the world’s most hostile seas from Antarctica’s Elephant Island to South Georgia. The team also used the same basic equipment, clothing and navigation technology as Shackleton nearly 100 years before. Jarvis and five other explorers shared boat space Jarvis has described as roughly “the size of a dining table”.
Not only was this to honour Shackleton’s legacy of leadership, but to raise global awareness of the impacts of climate change on Antarctica. “His was a journey of survival,” says Jarvis of Shackleton. “And there’s a very interesting parallel there between him and his team surviving calamity when their ship sank, and us on our journey to save ourselves from the environmental issues we’ve faced.”
Jarvis documented his journey in the film Shackleton: Death or Glory, bringing Shackleton’s story to a modern audience. By walking in Shackleton’s footsteps, the team could also see how much the Antarctic landscape had shifted over a century by comparing footage and photographs. In South Georgia in 2013, the team noted that glaciers had retreated from historic landing points or had meltwater waterfalls cascading from them. The König Glacier, which Shackleton once crossed, was now a meltwater lake. Today, over 90 per cent of glaciers on South
Georgia are in retreat.
The Shackleton journey wasn’t Jarvis’s first major expedition. In 1996, he went on a 500km unsupported crossing of the ice sheet of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic. Later, in 2007, Jarvis donned 1912-era equipment and recreated the survival journey of Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson, hauling a sled hundreds of kilometres across the crevassed Antarctic landscape.
By undertaking polar expeditions and reenactments, Jarvis hopes to harness the power of storytelling to get people to care about the environment in a way that dry data and graphs may not. “You need to make it more relatable and more interesting, and people need to trust you,” says Jarvis. “I think if they feel they can get inside your story and join that journey with you, then they’re prepared, perhaps, to come along with you, and change with you, in a way that just presenting them with the facts doesn’t.”
25zero
Noticing these drastic changes inspired another project for Jarvis, named 25zero. This documentary series saw Jarvis visiting glaciers near the equator, glaciers that have been there since the last ice age, over 15,000 years ago, to show their sharp decline in recent years.
South Georgia, where Shackleton, and later Jarvis, traversed, has many valley-based glaciers. “You’ve got some points of reference, because you can see them relative to mountains and see how much they’ve melted and retreated and things like that,” explains Jarvis. “So I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to do something in a place where nobody expected there to be any ice in the first place, as a hook, and use the amount of change that’s happened to those glaciers as a way to try and instil a sense of urgency.”
As part of 25zero, while at the summit of Uganda’s Mount Stanley, Jarvis beamed into the COP21 conference in Paris. The annual UN Climate Change Conference is attended by government delegates from almost 200 countries, as well as heads of state, UN officials, scientists, journalists and environmental activists. “I showed basically what that mountain looked like in 1906 when the first person went up, and what I saw in 2015,” says Jarvis. “I ran a six-or-seven-second transition, and you saw about a 90 per cent reduction in ice.”
Jarvis’s video gave context and credibility to the issue of climate change on the world stage, and attendees took notice. The Paris Agreement was reached at COP21, and 195 parties adopted the treaty. The goal of the agreement is to stop the world’s average temperature rising more than two degrees. “I like to think it added to that sense of urgency around Paris reaching an agreement,” says Jarvis.
The Forktree Project
But Jarvis doesn’t solely focus on far-flung expeditions; he’s also making a difference closer to home. In 2019, he purchased a 133-acre property in South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula, which Jarvis describes as one of Australia’s biodiversity hotspots, and established it as The Forktree Project. The goal of this registered not-for-profit organisation is to restore the degraded land as closely as possible to the way it was before early
European settlers cleared it for pastoral use.
The restoration also aims to sequester tens of thousands of tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), which Jarvis says can last for several hundred years. “The best way to combat it is to restore habitat at scale, because the trees, plants, fungi, soil and grasses that you can re-establish are the most effective way of drawing down that excess CO₂,” he explains. “In fact, we won’t solve climate change by driving electric cars and having solar on every roof, because we’ll still have that 200 years’ worth [of CO₂] up in the atmosphere wreaking havoc until we physically remove it, and I think habitat is the best way.”
Volunteers from schools, businesses and the local community help with tasks such as weeding, planting seeds and building flower beds. When complete, Forktree says the land will support a native ecosystem of more than 50,000 trees and shrubs rather than the 30 to 40 native trees on site when the project began. The results are already visible, with native wildlife, insects and bird populations increasing.
“We put in 32,000 plants over the last six years, and you’re really starting to see change, and it shows in the bird numbers, which is really exciting,” says Jarvis. He says the property now also has very rare butterfly species, including Chequered Coppers and Rayed Blues. While this achievement may seem small, Jarvis says butterflies are a sign of much larger progress. “They’re so sensitive to pollutants and the state of the environment that they’re a really good indicator of whether or not you’re starting to restore it well. But of course, those rare butterflies support
populations of other things, like birds, that actually predate on them.”
Beyond the environmental restoration goals, the project also aims to have a wider environmental educational reach. “Education doesn’t stop when you leave school, it’s really ongoing,” says Jarvis. “I find some of the people needing the most re-education are the adults, really, in terms of their behaviour.”
Forktree runs training programs for groups including politicians, corporations, universities and schools. Jarvis says Forktree has also inspired
several schools to set up their own initiatives and to incorporate “plant husbandry” into classes.
Be a mosquito
According to Jarvis, there are things Australia can do to contribute to a better planet. One is to be less reliant on fossil fuels and to focus on renewable energy resources such as wind and solar. The other is restoring natural landscapes to build back biodiversity and sequester CO₂, which is what he’s doing with Forktree, and which he hopes will serve as a replicable example for what is possible in land regeneration and carbon off setting.
But it’s not just systemic changes that will have an impact; individuals can contribute to change too. Jarvis refers to a quote that he attributes to The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick: “If you think being small can’t make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” He says, “I thought it was really powerful.”
Small steps, he suggests, are to switch to a green electricity plan, and to “decarbonise” your superannuation by switching to an ethical or environmentally conscious fund. Even small daily habit changes can make a difference. If you work within 5km of home, Jarvis suggests cycling,
walking or taking public transport, even just once per week. Research supports this. A 2021 study by the University of Oxford found that switching from driving to cycling to work just one day per week can drastically lower CO₂ emissions.
Antarctic advocacy
This year Jarvis will return to Antarctica as expedition leader, alongside other scientists. Their findings could open up possibilities for further space exploration. “Antarctica is like an analogue for space, and they’re testing equipment that could be used to find water on Mars, water on the moon, maybe even life on other planets,” explains Jarvis. “So we’re testing equipment in a cold, dry place like Antarctica, with a view to it being used to find resources and water on exoplanets.”
When he’s not adventuring in far-flung places, Jarvis lives with his wife and two sons in Adelaide. It’s a city that he loves for its blend of environmentalism, intellectualism, and plenty of outdoor green space for his love of hiking, climbing and cycling.
Every journey he’s taken has reminded Jarvis of the importance of protecting the planet before it’s too late. “The more expeditions I’ve done, to very remote places, the more I’ve realised just how far the human footprint goes,” he reflects.
Jarvis, like Mawson or Shackleton, reminds us that we should view every challenge, including tackling climate change, not as an unscalable mountain, but as a series of small steps, just placing one foot in front of the other to reach the summit.
“You must just focus on what you can control. Don’t be put off by the enormity of the bigger picture,” he says. “And it’s the same with expeditions. You diligently do what you have to do, knowing a storm could wipe you off the face of the place tomorrow, but it doesn’t stop you being diligent with what you can control.
“You know where you’re heading, but you’ve just got to keep making these little, sometimes micro adjustments, sometimes big adjustments, to still keep yourself on track to achieving what you’re setting out to achieve.”
This article is featured in WellBeing Magazine 224
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