Our aim: £3M to the best solution that enables people to plan and deliver optimised land management practices for carbon removal and financial sustainability
To have a chance of limiting warming below 1.5°C and averting the worst impacts of climate change, we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere at the scale of 100-1000 gigatonnes by 2100.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are among the most low-cost and effective methods of carbon removal, offering a route to tackling the interdependent climate and biodiversity crises. Whilst there is great appetite on the carbon market for NBS to offset carbon, many of these interventions are not meeting their full carbon sink potential based on the local environmental and land use factors of a specific area.
To optimise land management practices for carbon removal, we need smarter, data-driven tools that can also make it economically sustainable for people who own or manage the land, such as smallholder farmers, to implement these practices.
A challenge prize is uniquely suited to create data- driven tools for implementing nature-based solutions that can lead to systemic change.
By raising awareness among regulators and the public, a prize can inform and encourage an anticipatory regulation approach to redefine standards and regulations around high-quality carbon offsets.
Just as the Open Up Challenge enabled access to previously untapped sources of financial data, this prize can explore the opening of new information streams to stimulate data-driven innovation.
The challenge will empower smallholder farmers and other small landowners to participate directly in carbon offsets markets, or alternative routes to financial viability and sustainability.
Solutions should provide people with a user-friendly tool to collect accurate and relevant field data from their land. Enabling them to map the current carbon capture potential of their existing practice.
Combining this with biophysical, socioeconomic and other contextual datasets, the tool should offer farmers reliable and evidence-driven recommendations of optimised land management practices for carbon removal.
The winning solution will be co-designed with farmers, building on their experience as well as relevant local and indigenous knowledge, whilst making the process financially sustainable for them via the sale of carbon offsets.
Get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on this future prize.
This prize idea is designed to be a conversation starter, so tell us what you think!
The best prize ideas are developed through extensive research and engagement with experts, stakeholders and people with lived experience of the problems they are focused on. We start with a first draft like the one above – then work to improve, refine and validate our thinking.
We’re particularly keen to have conversations about this idea with potential funders and organisations working in the field. Get in touch if you’re interested – or if you think you have a better idea – and we’ll schedule a call.
Challenge Works has put together a report shedding light on the role of challenge prizes in revitalising the UK Innovation Strategy.
Challenge prizes can complement grants, reduce risk in portfolios of government innovation investments, and can be particularly effective at stimulating near-market innovation targeting specific outcomes and private R&D investment.
