Climate Change Challenge Prize Fund Launched
Innovators working on new ways to tackle climate change are being invited to go head to head in a global competition for the funding to make their idea a reality. If you think you have a great innovation that will tackle climate change, here’s your chance to enter.
The FT Climate Change Challenge launched today by the FT, HP and sustainable development organisation Forum For The Future, will seek out the most exciting innovations - practical ideas which will reduce emissions and make us more resilient to the changes ahead.
The winner, chosen by Financial Times readers and an eminent panel of global business leaders, innovators and climate change experts, will receive a $75,000 prize, sponsored by HP to help develop their product or service and bring it to market.
All the best ideas will be presented to the FT’s worldwide business audience, and in this way the competition aims to help a range of projects to attract the support they need to scale up and maximise their ability to tackle climate change.
“Humankind needs all the ingenuity it can muster to tackle climate change. We will be showcasing some of the world’s best low-carbon innovations. We intend to show that there are solutions to climate change and that money can be made from them,” said Peter Madden, chief executive of the Forum.
The competition aims to find the most promising innovations in every field which has a role to play in responding to climate change. The winning entry could be a technical advance in reducing emissions or a social innovation helping individuals become more resilient to the local impacts of climate change.
The key requirement is that the ideas will have moved off the drawing board and demonstrated their feasibility. Entries must specify how they would use the prize money to develop and extend the product or service. Innovations which have been developed by large companies or which already have major financial support will not be considered.
Forum for the Future will review all the entries and present the 12 most innovative, promising ideas to our panel of judges. They will select five ideas which can be developed and scaled up effectively to give the greatest contribution to tackling climate change. FT readers will vote to select the winner who will be announced in the spring.
The judges are:
Lionel Barber, Editor, Financial Times
Sir Richard Branson, Chairman, Virgin Group
Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change and Strategies for the Global Environment
Mark Hurd, Chairman of the Board and CEO, HP
Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Director-General, TERI and Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director, Forum for the Future and Chairman, UK Sustainable Development Commission
Leon Sandler, Executive Director, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, MIT
To read more about the competition, visit www.ft.com/climatechallenge
Entry forms can be completed or downloaded on the Forum’s site: www.forumforthefuture.org/FT-climate-challenge
The deadline for applications is January 30th.
