The Earthshot Prize has updated its initial roadmap for 2023 outlining fifteen areas the Prize says it sees the potential to “rapidly” replace damaging and unsustainable practices with solutions.
The challenges the Prize focuses on are “Protect and Restore Nature, Clean our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate”.
The priorities for “Build a Waste-Free World” laid out in the updated roadmap are reducing food loss from farm-to-fork, phasing out single-use and non-recycled plastics, and high-value circularity in fashion and electronics.
First awarded in 2021, The Earthshot Prize is given to five winners every year who receive a grant of £1 million for their contributions to environmentalism. The Prize is planned to run annually until 2030.
The Prize first introduced a roadmap in 2021 but has now launched an updated version for 2023, which sets how it thinks environmental challenges should be tackled.
The Earthshot Prize says the roadmap acts as a guide to its “Official Nominators” for how to filter the 1000+ nominations it receives each year down to 15 finalists.
The priorities set out in the roadmap for “Protect and Restore Nature” are protecting areas of high biodiversity such as forests, wetlands, peatlands and wildlife corridors, restoring damaged ecosystems, and feeding people while protecting nature.
Regarding the “Clean our Air” challenge, the roadmap’s priority areas are engaging citizens in data collection and clean air policies, preventing the burning of fields, forests and waste, and transitioning to clean transportation for all.
For the “Revive Our Oceans” challenge, the roadmap’s priorities are protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems, replenishing fish populations, and reducing demand for fishmeal.
Finally, the priorities in the roadmap for the “Fix Our Climate” are creating an equitable clean energy future, addressing non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, and decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors.
In addition to these priority areas, the Roadmap identifies five “cross-cutting enablers”, which the Prize says are key approaches that potential solutions could adopt that would accelerate the environmental improvements it seeks.
The approaches highlighted include projects that use technology, AI or data to enable “transformative change and those “led and informed” by indigenous and local communities.
Other approaches are solutions that promote shared economic opportunity and enable policy change.
The final approach is solutions that create or leverage nature and carbon markets, novel financial mechanisms and essential legal solutions.
