All About This Year’s Earthshot Prize Winners
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Tonight, the MGM Music Hall at Fenway was transformed for an evening celebrating solutions to help repair our planet. Prince William and Kate Middleton took to the stage, but the spotlight was firmly on the five winners who have each been awarded £1 million to help grow and develop their innovations.
A start-up providing cleaner-burning stoves in Kenya and packaging made from seaweed are among this year’s recipients of the Earthshot Prize. “I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet’s greatest challenges. And by supporting and scaling them we can change our future,” Prince William said during tonight's ceremony.
Here are this year’s Earthshot Prize winners:
Clean Our Air: Mukuru Clean Stoves, Kenya
This start-up provides cleaner-burning stoves to women in Kenya to reduce unhealthy indoor pollution and provide a safer way to cook. “In 2017, I set out to help women in Mukuru reduce household air pollution,” Mukuru Clean Stoves Founder and CEO, Charlot Magayi, said in a statement from the Earthshot Prize. “Five years later, 200,000 households in Kenya use our stoves and The Earthshot Prize is going to help us reach 1 million households, enabling 5 million people to benefit from cleaner air and putting us so much closer to achieving our goal of eradicating household air pollution.”
Protect and Restore Nature: Kheyti, India
Kheyti has created Greenhouse-in-a-Box, a pioneering solution for smallholder farmers to reduce costs, increase yields, and protect livelihoods in a country on the frontlines of climate change.“The idea of Kheyti started from a simple dream – that the hard work of half a billion farmers across the world should pay off,” said Kaushik Kappagantulu, the Kheyti Greenhouse-in-a-Box co-founder and CEO. “The only reason our vision persevered is because others shared that dream – our team, our families and most importantly, our 1,000+ farmers who took a chance with us.”
Revive Our Oceans: Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia
This women-led program combines 60,000 years of indigenous knowledge with digital technologies to protect land and sea. The program has trained more than 60 women, encouraging new conservation approaches by sharing knowledge and telling stories. “This prize is a game changer,” said Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network Founder Larissa Hale. “We are going to create a global groundswell of First Nations female-led conservation programs, a network of women coming together to help repair the planet fueled by ancient knowledge and new technology.”
Build a Waste-Free World: Notpla, United Kingdom
London-based startup Notpla has created an alternative to plastic packaging from seaweed. Their first product, edible water bubble Ooho, has been billed as the solution for on-the-go hydration at events to avoid waste. They also make paper from seaweed fibers, packaging for food and pipettes for edible oils. “When Rodrigo and I started Notpla 8 years ago in our student kitchen, we would have never imagined we would be here today,” Notpla co-founder Pierre Paslier said. “No one wants to live in a world full of plastic waste but it’s not too late to act. There’s never been a greater time to use natural solutions to solve the plastic challenge.”
Fix Our Climate: 44.01, Oman
Childhood friends have developed an innovative technique to turn CO2 into rock and permanently store it underground. Oman-based 44.01, named after the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, eliminates CO2 by turning it into rock, removing it from the atmosphere safely, efficiently, and permanently by mineralizing it in peridotite, a rock found in abundance in Oman, United States, Europe, Asia, and Australasia. “We started 44.01 two years ago because we saw the very real impact of climate change here in Oman,” said 44.01 Founder, Carbon General and CEO Talal Hasan said. “Winning The Earthshot Prize will help us scale our solution around the world, and ultimately eliminate billions of tonnes of CO2.”
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