Winners by region

The sun is the ultimate inexhaustible power source for human civilization. We at C2X are passionate about utilizing solar energy to convert CO2 emissions into useful products. “C2X” means carbon to X, where X represents various possibilities. Our vision is to see CO2 as an opportunity rather than a liability. Our team has developed a highly efficient “artificial photosynthesis” process that transforms CO2 into alcohols, such as ethanol, which is a renewable fuel and can be used for producing hand sanitizer. Our reactor design is modular, scalable, and expandable. C2X has partnered with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) through the Young Changemakers on Sustainable WASH Solutions Programme. Our team aspires to use our CO2 conversion technology to kill two birds with one stone: combatting the COVID-19 pandemic while mitigating global climate change. By converting harmful emissions into solar commodities, we are enabling a circular carbon economy.

Today, our global agricultural system for fresh food is completely broken. Miravel (mirəvel – “to look at the marvel of life”) has created the world’s first fully functioning agriculture system that empowers people everywhere to effortlessly and cost-effectively grow their own food. The company’s hardware product is designed to look beautiful on the wall, but, better yet, it automatically grows a wide range of plants with programmed LED grow lights, fans, and watering. This device works in conjunction with proprietary “seed squares” that contain seeds and nutrients within a specialized growth media for each plant type. A user simply has to pick what they want to grow, place 10 seed squares within the system, fill it with water, and sit back to watch their plants thrive. In 3-5 weeks, they’ll have nutrient-packed produce that’s healthy, sustainable, and fresh from wall to table. The company’s driving mission is to help transition our entire world to this more sustainable model of decentralized food production.

The Run4Salmon prayerful journey engages government officials, lawyers, advocates, and everyday people on a 300-mile journey that the endangered Chinook salmon make along the waters of California’s largest watershed. The project is aimed at inspiring, educating, and engaging people in restoring this endangered keystone species that is essential to the health of California lands and waters. In the face of climate change, ecological collapse and pandemics, indigenous-led species restoration is key to building a resilient future that can withstand and thrive as climate change continues to unravel. The project is coupled with advocacy, campaigns, and indigenous curriculum.

The 10.5 million hectares of officially ratified Kayapo indigenous territory has proven a formidable barrier to deforestation in the southeastern Amazon thanks to the ~10,000 Kayapo indigenous inhabitants, who have defended their lands for generations. Intensifying global demand for beef, soy, gold and timber drives illegal invasion and resource extraction, yet global consumers remain disconnected from these challenges facing vulnerable people and places. Working with nine Kayapo communities, The Kayapó Project harnesses conservation-based adventure travel to protect the indigenous culture and natural resources unique to the pristine Xingu River Basin. By expanding and diversifying successful local catch-and-release sport-fishing tourism to include indigenous-led birding, photography and wildlife-viewing tourism micro-enterprises, this project supports continued efforts to defend Kayapo lands, provides sustainable equitably-distributed income, and creates an avenue to immerse, educate and engage international tourists in local cultures, traditional ecological knowledge and global environmental threats.

By developing and offering specialized tools, content, and training, Earthsong empowers artists, activists, and educators to restore balance between humankind, nature, and society.

Earthsong produces educational media, develops classroom resources, and hosts unique workshops with artists, youth, and communities. Our work with over 100 musicians has reached millions of people in locally relevant genres and languages. Our volunteers have engaged face-to-face with over 10,000 individuals in vulnerable communities. Our compositions deliver a message, hold attention and memory, and evoke an emotional response. 77% of our listeners have learned new, useful information.

Localization is essential. We identify talented youth leaders and empower them with structures, resources, knowledge, and guidance to lead their own organizations at the national level. They maintain relationships with artists and broadcasters, engage communities and schools with solar-powered video screenings and activities like tree planting and waste cleanup, produce and distribute local educational songs and videos, and more.

GoodLands is working to bring nature conservation to the scale and impact of Catholic healthcare and education, as the largest global network of its kind. They are bringing the most powerful technology for large-scale property planning and sustainability - Geographic Information Systems - to the Catholic Church.

The extraction and consumption of fossil carbon to run our daily lives accounts for over 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, driving climate change. By not viewing fossil fuels and feedstocks through a “circular economy” lens, companies “throw away” approximately US$50 billion each year in potential profit from what could be made with waste carbon dioxide such as methanol. HI-Light is a solar-thermal chemical reactor technology for converting carbon dioxide into fuels like syngas or methanol. The technology seeks to achieve a kind of artificial photosynthesis inside a factory or a power plant – combining sunlight, carbon dioxide and chemicals to photo-catalytically produce renewable fuel. Our technique makes carbon dioxide capture and conversion more economical. The current conversion of carbon dioxide into useful chemicals by weight is a very small percent of the close to two billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by power plants in the United States alone. HI-Light’s “reverse combustion” technology converts carbon dioxide into high-value hydrocarbons, increasing its value as a commodity. The unique design feature of our reactor is the optimized light delivery coupled with opto-thermal heating to reach elevated temperatures where reaction rates are higher.

The Circular Economy Club is the non-profit international network of over 3,500 circular economy professionals and organizations from over 100 countries. Our vision is to live in an era where all cities function through a circular model, setting the end of an age of waste. The Club’s mission is to bring the circular economy to cities from Accra to Delhi, Quito to Amsterdam - by building strong local networks to design and implement circular local strategies, embed the circular economy in the education system and help circular solutions scale. The Club is managed voluntarily by a team of 37 worldwide volunteers and supported by 50 mentor, who have given 130 hours of free mentoring to start-ups and students, and by 200 organizers who voluntarily bring people together to design and implement local circular economy strategies in their cities. The circular economy is an alternative to the linear economy, where all products and services are designed with the intention to avoid waste, and used materials flow back into the system by being resold, shared, refurbished or recycled. When Organizers sign up to the program, they receive toolkits and communications materials, exchange knowledge with the rest of organizers globally, and they are able to coordinate their local communities.

We are building a global network of musicians and youth volunteers to deliver environmental education through the catalytic power of music. The neuroscience is clear: music activates more regions of the brain than even language does. This power can and must be used for the good of the earth and its people, especially in times of great division like those we are experiencing. We foster a global community in which the memorable, emotional, and unifying power of music contributes to the balance between humankind, nature, and society. We produce media, develop classroom resources, and lead live events and workshops. Our content reaches millions over radio, TV, online and also face-to-face, in nationally relevant genres and languages. Our music is composed to deliver a message while holding attention and inspiring an emotional response, without only preaching to the choir. To sustain this global movement at the national level, we identify talented youth leaders and empower them with structures, resources, and strategies to lead eco-musical revolutions. They maintain relationships with artists and broadcasters, offer solar-powered video screenings and activations like tree planting and waste clean-ups, produce local songs and videos.

ChimpFace uses chimpanzee facial recognition and mapping technologies to investigate when and where wildlife trafficking occurs. ChimpFace works with researchers, investigators, and citizen scientists through a free cell phone app to collect photos of chimps in the wild, for sale online, and in captivity. The app examines chimp photos for recognition and determines when and where we have seen an individual chimp before, alerting authorities of potential criminal movements. This tool will be especially useful in three primary situations: 1) surveying the internet for photographic evidence of live chimp trafficking; 2) monitoring the trade in live captive chimps; and 3) studying wild chimp populations. We’ve built a prototype, have seen preliminary success identifying two chimps seized in Nepal, and already have plans to expand this technology to include more animal species.

Majik Water uses novel technology combined with locally-adapted design to harvest clean drinking water from the atmosphere and deliver it to people and communities in our world’s driest places, starting in Kenya. Our technology uses solar thermal energy and sponge-like desiccant materials making it possible to get water in a low cost, energy efficient way. Desiccants are materials that adsorb water from air, and release water when heated. The desiccant we use is a material which is safe, non-toxic and abundantly available. How it works: i) Air is pulled into the device using solar powered fan; ii) Desiccant material absorbs water droplets from air; iii) Desiccant is exposed to heat (generated by solar), releasing the moisture as water vapour; iv) This water vapour is condensed into water and filtered with activated carbon; v) The clean water is stored in a tank and accessed via a gravity fed tap system which does not require a motor.

With wild tiger populations nearly wiped out, traffickers are now slaughtering jaguars to falsely sell their parts as tiger on the Asian market – and the world has no idea. My documentary, MADIDI, will follow three individuals who are investigating this new jaguar trade sweeping South America, uncovering the powerful forces responsible for it all. After MADIDI reveals this little-known issue to the public, the film’s impact campaign will bring NGOs, journalists, celebrities, and government officials together to fight against jaguar trafficking before this iconic animal is gone forever.

Atmospheric CO2 must decrease to 350ppm. Some Governments and Businesses are tackling climate change but not fast enough, leaving it to non-profits, often small underfunded groups fighting David vs. Goliath battles that I’ve experienced through Plastic Tides. Businesses drive our economy and society, and must work collaboratively doing ‘more good’, not just ‘less bad’. Regenerative perennial agriculture, Tropical forests, educating girls, plant rich diets and renewables are the best approaches to reversing climate change. We must integrate these into the food we eat, the materials we use, and the products we put on our bodies. The body care industry is 135-Billion-dollars. ANATO educates about regenerative agriculture and ocean conservation via consumer products that are healthy and affordable. Our body care’s ingredients— tree-crops— sequester carbon and provide ecosystem services. Rooted in multifunctionality and minimalism, we offer tools for the Zero Waste Voyage making sustainability, practical. Our enterprise is regenerative by design.

BioCellection is tackling the plastic crisis by developing an economical recycling solution for currently unrecyclable plastic waste. The team has developed a chemical process that transforms plastics into renewable chemicals for sustainable virgin-quality materials. The  team aspires to process seventeen metric tons of plastic waste in California per year. At commercial scale, BioCellection fabricates modular process skids to treat plastic waste on a regional level around the world. Products from these regions are centralized and purified in chemical facilities.

The Moringa oleifera tree is one of the most nutrient-dense plants on the planet. It thrives in hot, dry climates with sandy soil. I first started working with the moringa tree six years ago as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, West Africa. After conducting a community-needs assessment, I realized that there was an opportunity to support women in West Africa to plant more moringa trees on degraded land. My goal was to help them earn a sustainable income from selling the powdered leaves, in addition to eating them locally. Upon returning to the US, I founded Kuli Kuli, a mission-driven business that works with moringa farmers in Ghana, Haiti and Nicaragua and sells moringa products in over 3,000 stores across America. Access to UNEP’s resources and network would allow us to continue to scale up our moringa tree plantings and partnerships with farmers around the world.

Kulisha works with food and beverage producers to convert organic waste into sustainable insect protein for use in animal feeds. Food and beverage companies such as breweries and juicers produce huge volumes of by products that are primarily being trucked to landfills as organic waste. We work with them to integrate black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) into their operations and metabolize the waste, rather than using inefficient and expensive disposal methods. We implement automated, retrofitted shipping containers that treat the organic waste and feed it to the larvae, which are then harvested and sold as protein for use in animal feeds. This provides a sustainable, high-quality alternative to fishmeal, thereby addressing a second problem: the demand for fishmeal in animal feeds that is driving the destruction of the world’s oceans. Ultimately, the intent of Kulisha is to reduce pressure on ocean ecosystems.

Novel Supply Co. is a conscious local apparel company. Kaya created a fully closed-loop clothing line with no waste and automated manufacturing. She integrated a research and development hub to test leading-edge technology that decomposes fabrics and tests natural dyes. She also implemented an Extended Producer Responsibility policy by having a Take Back Program for the clothing she produces. Kaya works in partnership with local universities.

Rainmaker Enterprise is an award-winning, scalable and climate adaptive social venture committed to combating deforestation, food insecurity, water scarcity, chronic poverty, women and youth unemployment among other cross-sectional issues in rural South Sudan through provision of clean water using clean solar-energy. The initiative will install solar-powered water pumps and drip-irrigation systems across villages in South Sudan to achieve these objectives. The rest site installation will be in Tonj, South Sudan in December 2017.