How can we accelerate innovation to respond to the climate crisis?

What if we could….

• Scale up global access to clean, reliable and affordable electricity?
• Grow exponentially more food in increasingly arid conditions, sustainably?
• Beam down solar energy from space?
• Empower communities in rapidly-growing cities to shape their city’s future?
• Help smallholder farmers remove carbon from the atmosphere and reshape the carbon capture markets? 
• Expand ways for young people displaced by the climate crisis to continue their education? 

To address the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, we need bold breakthroughs such as these to come close to meeting net zero emissions goals while adapting to the reality of a changing world – particularly for our most vulnerable communities.

In this new report, Climate Possible: How funders can accelerate innovation for a resilient future, we set out a series of challenge prize concepts to explore the possibilities of how challenge-based, outcome-driven funding can contribute to a more climate-resilient future. 

Despite the undeniable urgency of the climate crisis, the multiplicity of the problems we face, and the many brilliant individuals and institutions working to solve these problems, we risk failing to create and rapidly scale profoundly transformational solutions that will create a better future for all.

We need to challenge a diversity of innovators with bold calls to action centred around clear goals, and create pathways for the best solutions to rapidly scale – because funding one-off solutions will never achieve global impact. 

Remarkable creativity and innovation created the systems underpinning the modern world, but in some ways have also brought us into the climate crisis. Now, we need to harness that same power of innovation and human ingenuity to solve these problems. 

Building on 10 years of catalysing innovation in response to big social and environmental challenges, we intend to launch a series of challenge prizes in the next year centred around climate response, to spur transformational change and enable us to rapidly develop, test and scale the innovations that our planet and our communities so urgently need. 

We’d love to hear from potential funders, innovators, experts and other partners interested in collaborating on our big and bold ideas, and to help us realise a series of outcomes-based, open innovation challenges that will create lasting global impact.