Business Wire

THE-EARTHSHOT-PRIZE

17.9.2021 19:03:10 CEST | Business Wire | Press release

Share
Prince William announces 15 Finalists for inaugural year of the £50 million Earthshot Prize

The Earthshot Prize announces today its first-ever shortlist of 15 Finalists, each with a chance of winning £1million to support their innovative environmental solutions to the greatest challenges facing the planet.

Prince William said: "Over half a century ago, President Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ programme united millions of people around the goal of reaching the moon. Inspired by this, The Earthshot Prize aims to mobilise collective action around our unique ability to innovate, problem solve and repair our planet.

“I am honoured to introduce the 15 innovators, leaders, and visionaries who are the first ever Finalists for The Earthshot Prize. They are working with the urgency required in this decisive decade for life on Earth and will inspire all of us with their optimism in our ability to rise to the greatest challenges in human history.”

Launched by Prince William and The Royal Foundation in October 2020, The Earthshot Prize is the most prestigious global environment prize in history. Like President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ did almost 60 years ago, the Prize aims to unleash an unprecedented wave of innovation and leadership to tackle our greatest environmental challenges. The Earthshot Prize will be awarded every year for the next decade, discovering a total of 50 Winners.

Five of these 15 Finalists will be awarded The Earthshot Prize and will win £1million in Prize funding for the best solutions of the five Earthshot goals: Protect and Restore Nature; Clean our Air; Revive our Oceans; Build a Waste-free World; and Fix our Climate . The Winners will be announced during an awards ceremony on 17th October from London’s Alexandra Palace, broadcast in the UK on BBC One and globally on Discovery+.

The Earthshot Prize Finalists for 2021 are:

Protect and Restore Nature:

- Pole Pole Foundation, Democratic Republic of Congo

An inspiring community-led model of conservation that protects gorillas and local livelihoods.

- The Republic of Costa Rica

A pioneering scheme paying local citizens to restore natural ecosystems that has led to a revival of the rainforest.

- Restor, Switzerland

A ground-breaking online platform connecting and empowering local conservation projects.

Clean our Air:

- The Blue Map App, China

China’s first public environmental database enabling citizens to hold polluters to account.

- Takachar, India

A pioneering technology to create profitable products from agricultural waste and put a stop to the burning of crops.

- Vinisha Umashankar, India

A 14-year-old innovator and activist who has designed a solar-powered ironing cart with the potential to improve air quality across India.

Revive our Oceans:

- Coral Vita, Bahamas

A truly cutting-edge breakthrough in coral farming that can restore our world’s dying coral reefs.

- Living Seawalls, Australia

Innovative and replicable seawall panels bringing marine life back to coastal sea defences.

- Pristine Seas, USA

An unprecedented global conservation programme protecting 6.5 million square km of the world’s ocean.

Build a Waste-Free World:

- The City of Milan Food Waste Hubs, Italy

A city-wide initiative that has dramatically cut waste while tackling hunger.

- Sanergy, Kenya

A circular sanitation solution that converts human waste into safe products for local farmers.

- WOTA BOX, Japan

A tiny water treatment plant that turns 98% of wastewater into clean water.

Fix our Climate:

- AEM Electrolyser, Thailand/Germany/Italy

An ingenious green hydrogen technology developed to transform how we power our homes and buildings.

- Reeddi Capsules, Nigeria

Solar-powered energy capsules making electricity affordable and accessible in energy-poor communities.

- SOLbazaar, Bangladesh

The world’s first peer-to-peer energy exchange network in a country on the front-line of climate change.

All 15 Finalists will receive support from The Earthshot Prize Global Alliance Members, an unprecedented network of global businesses, who will help scale their solutions for even greater impact.

Of these 15 Finalists, the five Winners will be selected by The Earthshot Prize Council, a diverse team of influential individuals which includes: HRH Prince William, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Sir David Attenborough, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Indra Nooyi, Shakira Mebarak, Christiana Figueres, Luisa Neubauer, Cate Blanchett, Yao Ming, Daniel Alves Da Silva, Ernest Gibson, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Jack Ma, and Naoko Yamazaki.

In the run-up to the prize-giving ceremony on 17 October, BBC and Discovery will release a 5-part documentary series THE EARTHSHOT PRIZE: REPAIRING OUR PLANET, featuring Earthshot Prize Council Members including Prince William, Shakira Mebarak, Daniel Alves Da Silva and Sir David Attenborough.

For more information about the Finalists and The Earthshot Prize, visit: www.earthshotprize.org , email Claire Straw: TEPmedia@freuds.com, download media pack here .

Link:

ClickThru

About Business Wire

Business Wire
Business Wire
101 California Street, 20th Floor
CA 94111 San Francisco

http://businesswire.com

Subscribe to releases from Business Wire

Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Latest releases from Business Wire

Icon Solutions Showcases How Banks Can Accelerate Digital Asset Innovation with IPF9.6.2026 11:30:00 CEST | Press release

Banks can now deploy digital asset payments faster, without risking fragmentation Icon Solutions – the UK fintech enabling banks to design and implement state-of-the-art payment systems – has released a reference implementation showing how banks can use the Icon Payments Framework (IPF) to accelerate support for payments processing using distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based digital assets. As IPF is agnostic to both the type of digital asset and the DLT network on which they are issued, the risk of fragmentation is reduced as adoption scales. There is growing momentum for digital assets such as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, deposit tokens and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to enable faster, cheaper and smarter payments. Yet the emergence of different digital asset types and DLT networks – which must also work with existing financial infrastructure – creates fragmentation and operational complexity for banks. This is compounded by legacy vendor solutions that limit choi

monday.com Appoints Ben Barnett General Manager of EMEA to Drive Next Phase of Regional Growth9.6.2026 10:00:00 CEST | Press release

In 2025, monday.com saw 26% YoY revenue growth in EMEABarnett will be a driving force in monday.com’s biggest transformation yet monday.com (Nasdaq: MNDY), the AI work platform that turns strategy into execution at scale, today announced Ben Barnett’s appointment to General Manager (GM) of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, marking a major milestone in the company’s global expansion. Ben, who has been with monday.com for five years, brings a decade of experience in senior B2B sales roles at software companies and has overseen significant, sustained growth at monday.com in the UK and Ireland since joining in 2021. In his new position, Ben’s priorities include delivering the monday.com’s EMEA go-to-market strategy, fostering key partnerships, and bolstering its newly announced AI work platform. He is based in London. Ben’s promotion comes as monday.com builds on a period of rapid regional success, with EMEA revenue up 26% year-on-year in 2025. Last year, monday.com expanded its regional

Interactive Brokers Launches Commission-Free iShares ETFs from BlackRock through Recurring Investment Feature Across Europe9.6.2026 10:00:00 CEST | Press release

Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR), an automated global broker, today announced the launch of Commission-Free ETFs within its Recurring Investment feature for eligible individual investors across the European Economic Area. Investors can now access more than 500 commission-free iShares ETFs from BlackRock spanning a broad range of asset classes and strategies, including bonds, equities, themes and sectors. The iShares ETFs available on the IBKR platform give individual investors an accessible, cost-efficient way to build well-diversified portfolios. Since investors pay no trading commissions, more of their capital stays invested and compounding over time, while a broad selection of funds across asset classes makes it straightforward to construct and rebalance portfolios. iShares ETFs are available commission-free through IBKR's Recurring Investments feature, allowing investors to automate their periodic ETF contributions. Clients can select individual ETFs or ETF portfolios, set a cont

Forrester Reveals The Top 10 Highest-Performing Brands In Its 2026 Global Total Experience Score Rankings​ At Its CX Events9.6.2026 09:30:00 CEST | Press release

Introduced last year, the Total Experience Score evaluates the combined influence of brand and customer experience on overall brand perception among both noncustomers and customers According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2026 global Total Experience Score rankings of 375 brands evaluated across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America in 2025 and 2026, 41% improved their scores while only 3% declined. A compelling total experience — calculated by combining Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), Brand Experience Index (BX Index™), and, for the first time, the new Employee Experience Index (EX Index™) into a unified view of performance — can drive outsized growth for brands. While brand experience and customer experience can each drive revenue independently, the impact multiplies when they are orchestrated together as a unified total experience. In the US, for example, companies delivering a strong total experience see significantly higher returns from retention and enrichment

IQM Announces Novel Quantum Error Correction Approach Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing9.6.2026 09:00:00 CEST | Press release

New approach delivers cutting edge performance, while significantly reducing hardware complexity IQM Quantum Computers, the global leader in superconducting quantum computers, has developed a novel quantum error-correcting code that achieves up to three orders of magnitude lower logical error rates than the surface code, also requiring up to eight times fewer physical qubits. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260609533201/en/ IQM´s breakthrough technology, called barbell codes. Unlike many alternative high-performance quantum error-correction approaches, the new code also maintains a comparatively low hardware complexity, marking a significant advancement toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quantum error correction remains one of the defining challenges in the race toward practical quantum computing. Errors introduced by noise must be corrected faster than they accumulate, a requirement that previo

In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.

Visit our pressroom
World GlobeA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.HiddenA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.Eye