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Sparks

Prince William Announces the Earthshot Prize Winners

They include startups focused on protecting Andean forests, recycling batteries, and setting up a carbon market for soil.

Hannah Waddingham and Prince William.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Earthshot Prize, an annual award by Prince William’s Royal Foundation, was given to five climate-focused startups on Tuesday. The winners — each of which will receive $1.2 million and “tailored support” from the prize’s “global alliance of partners” — were Acción Andina, a Peruvian initiative to protect Andean forests; GRST, a Hong Kong builder and recycler of lithium-ion batteries; S4S Technologies, an Indian project to combat food waste and reduce rural poverty; WildAid, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving ocean health; and Boomitra, a multinational company working to create a soil carbon marketplace.

“I choose to believe that future generations will look back on this decade as the point at which we globally took collective action for our planet… [and] became the architects of change towards a healthy and sustainable world,” Prince William said at the ceremony, which was held at Singapore's Theatre at MediaCorp.

The initiative launched in 2020 with the goal of boosting 50 such environmental solutions by 2030, each year awarding prizes in five categories: Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate. Past winners include an Indian producer of small greenhouses that aims to help farmers become more climate-resilient, and a Thai company whose “plug and play" electrolyzers offer an innovative approach to creating clean hydrogen fuel.

This year’s winners were selected by the prince, former United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Fijian climate activist Ernest Gibson, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and others. The ceremony was co-hosted by actors Hannah Waddingham and Sterling K. Brown, and celebrity presenters included Cate Blanchett and Robert Irwin, the 19-year-old son of the late Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin.

“It fills me with a lot of hope when there’s an incredible public figure, a real voice for change, who is putting his platform behind environmental issues,” Irwin said of Prince William. “And instead of focusing on all the ways the world is suffering, [The Earthshot Prize is] an initiative that … is a beacon of hope.”

Green

Jacob Lambert

Jacob is Heatmap's founding multimedia editor. Before joining Heatmap, he was The Week's digital art director and an associate editor at MAD magazine. Read More

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Sparks

Al Gore Said Something Funny at COP28

The former U.S. Vice President invoked Dickens in an interview with Bloomberg.

Former Vice President Al Gore at COP28.
Heatmap illustration/Getty Images

Al Gore is done mincing words. In a TED Talk this past July titled “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know,” the former U.S. Vice President and long-time climate champion took aim at the major oil and gas producers. “They have used fraud on a massive scale,” he said. “They’ve used falsehoods on an industrial scale. And they’ve used their legacy political and economic networks, lavishly funded, to capture the policymaking process in too many countries around the world.”

So you can imagine how he might feel attending COP28 in a petrostate (the United Arab Emirates), hosted by a petroexecutive (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber), surrounded by petrorepresentatives (more than 2,400 of them).

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