News – Blog
First Earthshot Prize winners, COP26 and innovation for environmental sustainability
5 November 2021
We all know the pressing need for climate action. The UN Climate Change Conference that takes place over the next few weeks is a stark reminder of the challenge ahead of us.
Commitments to date from governments around the world are nowhere near enough to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius. And while hopes are high that global leaders will make progress at the Glasgow summit, every fraction of a degree brings greater risk. There is no safe level of climate change. Sea level rises, habitat loss, extreme weather events will gather pace in coming decades.
But there is hope – and it comes from attacking climate change from every angle possible. Political commitments from world leaders are critical. So are individual changes in lifestyle. And so are innovations – in technology, in services and in environmental management.
The Earthshot Prize is a great example of an initiative to promote innovation for environmental sustainability.
Every year for the next ten years, five prizes of £1m will be handed out to exceptional individuals or organisations making progress against five key environmental missions.
The first round of winners were announced in October 2021.
It’s an example of the growing trend of using prizes to drive environmental innovation. Other initiatives include Elon Musk’s $100m Carbon Removal X Prize, the world’s most lucrative challenge prize, launched in April 2021.
Challenge Works is active here too
As well as past prizes on renewable energy and waste reduction, our current prize portfolio includes the Million Cool Roofs Challenge, which launched in 2019 and will be awarded early 2022, and the Afri-Plastics Challenge, which launched in Autumn 2021.
The Million Cool Roofs Challenge, which we are delivering for ClimateWorks Foundation (as part of the Clean Cooling Collaborative), will reward the team that develops the best service for installing and marketing cool roofs – reflective roofs that avoid the need for wasteful air conditioning.
The Afri-Plastics Challenge – three prizes in one, funded by Global Affairs Canada – is incentivising entrepreneurs to create, scale and raise awareness of innovative approaches to tackling plastic waste across sub-Saharan Africa.
The Earthshot Prize works slightly differently to the Challenge Works prizes. In our prizes (as with the Elon Musk Carbon Removal X Prize), we invite innovators to apply with a concept. We then support a cohort of teams to compete, developing their proposal into a solution typically over a year or more, with judges awarding a final cash prize to the best team at the end.
In the Earthshot Prize, nominating organisations (we’re one of them) put forward people or organisations who are already working on solutions, with the prize working both as a reward and financial subsidy for their good work – and an incentive for others to do good work in future years.
But let’s not descend into narcissism about small differences between our processes and theirs! The Earthshot Prize team have done a great job of rewarding breakthrough innovation, of supporting innovator teams and of raising awareness. These are the exact same objectives we set ourselves in our own prizes.
We wish them and their winners well, and can’t wait to see what the next nine years of Earthshot bring.
