The Earthshot Prize, the most prestigious and ambitious global environment prize in history, designed to incentivise change and aid in the repair of our planet over the next ten years, announced its five winners of the 2022 Prize on Friday.
On 2 December 2022, the five winners were announced at the second-ever Earthshot Prize Awards Ceremony, which took place at the MGM Music Hall in Boston. The ceremony celebrated not only the 2022 winners and finalists, but also the city’s ongoing sustainable transformation. As Global Fashion Agenda was an official Nominator for the Earthshot Prize this year, our CEO, Federica Marchionni, was honored to attend the Ceremony.
This year’s Finalists for The Earthshot Prize 2022, chosen by the Earthshot Prize Council, included leaders, activists, innovators, and even a forward-thinking city, each of whom represented an extraordinary solution to one of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.
The nominees offered solutions in-line with the five ‘Earthshot’ goals: Protect and Restore Nature, Clean our Air, Revive our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World and Fix our Climate. Below is an outline of the five winning projects of each category:
Protect and Restore Nature: Kheyti, India
Kheyti is an Indian start-up that designs and implements low-cost farming solutions to assist small farmers in increasing yield and predictability of produce, which ultimately brings about increased income. Small-hold farmers that produce one-third of the food we consume, are among the poorest and most vulnerable to climate change. Kheyti’s “Greenhouse-in-a-Box” solution uses 90% less water and grows 7 times more food[1] to provide a steady and dependable income to India’s 100 million small-hold farmers[2].
Clean our Air: Mukuru Clean Stoves, Kenya
Based in Africa, Mukuru Clean Stoves designs and manufactures improved and affordable cook stoves for low-income households. Across Africa, millions of people continue to use traditional cookstoves, which emit dangerous chemicals that cause frequent respiratory infections and lack safety measures. Mukuru’s Clean Stoves are made of recycled waste metal which reduces production costs. Also, instead of burning dangerous fuels, it burns biomass made from charcoal, wood, and sugarcane, which reduces fuel consumption and thus toxic smoke emissions and burn risks.
Revive our Oceans: Indigenous Women Of The Great Barrier Reef, Australia
The indigenous women of the Coral Sea off Queensland’s coast are critical to the Great Barrier Reef’s defense as it continues to face the constant environmental threat of global warming. The Indigenous Women of The Great Barrier Reef programme has trained over 60 women and encouraged new conservation approaches by sharing ancient knowledge passed down through generations. The program has succeeded in developing a new generation of female rangers, a field previously dominated by men, who aim to protect the region’s great cultural and spiritual significance.
Build a Waste-Free World: Notpla, the United Kingdom
To combat the untreated plastics that currently lie in landfills or reside at the bottom of our seas, Notpla, short for “not plastic”, produces natural and biodegradable alternatives to plastic made from seaweed and plants. Their plant-based solution can be used to create a variety of packaging products, with each product aiming to address specific plastic’s problem identified by the company across various industries, as the company is on a mission to eliminate packaging and ultimately the plastic pollution.
Fix our Climate: 44.01, Oman
Named after the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, 44.01 permanently removes CO2 from the atmosphere by mineralizing it in peridotite, a rock found in abundance in nature. While peridotite mineralisation is a natural process, even small amounts of CO2 can take many years to mineralise. 44.01 devised a method to accelerate the process in a safe, cost-effective, and scalable manner to combat the most disastrous effects of climate change.
[1] Kheyti. https://www.kheyti.com
[2] Earthshotprize. https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/kheyti/
Image Credit: The Earthshot Prize Pip Cowley
Prevailing trend categories have always existed, but historically these notions defined decades as opposed to a singular week on social media. We are now in the era of micro trends.
The global multinational Sanko Group, celebrating it’s 120 year anniversary this year, marks a new beginning with the establishment of Re&Up, a circulartech company under the holding's umbrella.
This article is a contribution from Next Gen Assembly 2023 Members, Ikeoluwa Adebisi and Indira Varma.
