25 Jun 2025
Strategic Partnerships Lead, The Earthshot Prize
At the halfway point of this decisive decade, it’s clear the world must act with greater urgency to repair the planet. Climate innovation and adaptation need to scale faster than ever before.
What if the quickest path to climate action is also the one that creates jobs, promotes justice, and drives economic inclusion?
A path that delivers both climate resilience and shared prosperity for the communities least responsible for the crisis, yet most exposed to its impacts.
With support from Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and contributions from CGAP, our journey to answer this question led to the release of our report at London Climate Action Week 2025: Unlocking Critical Finance for Climate & Economic Resilience.
We find that the answer lies not simply in more technology or more investment, but in redesigning the systems we already have for greater inclusion, resilience and speed.
The path forward is clearer than it seems, if we focus on the levers that matter: aligning investment with innovation, unlocking financial inclusion, and turning bold pledges into concrete pathways.
From the Philippines to India, Kenya to Colombia, powerful solutions are already delivering impact, not just on emissions reductions, but on food security, livelihoods, and long-term economic health.
These aren’t future hypotheticals; they’re working models of what’s possible when climate action is designed with resilience and financial inclusion in mind.
S4S Technologies
Winner of The Earthshot Prize in 2023, S4S Technologies in India equips women farmers with solar dryers and connects them to formal markets. This enables them to process and sell surplus produce locally, transforming them into microentrepreneurs and climate leaders. Their innovation combines clean energy, financial inclusion, and traceable supply chains to create green livelihoods at scale.
Coast 4C
Earthshot Prize Finalist Coast 4C in the Philippines creates gender equitable livelihood opportunities in seaweed aquaculture. They’re empowering marginalised coastal communities to become good stewards of coastal resources, using their unique local ecological knowledge and connection to the environment to help protect and restore coastal ecosystems and replenish fish populations.
Coast 4C helps protect coastal habitats and boost local incomes by leveraging the global boom in seaweed demand.
S4S Technologies reduces food waste amongst smallholder farmers through solar-powered dryers and processing equipment.
d.light
Earthshot Prize Finalist d.light brings clean energy access to millions in DR Congo, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia by providing and financing affordable solar solutions to those without access to electricity. Their Pay-Go model removes the barrier of upfront costs, reducing households’ vulnerability to financial shocks, while their clean electricity powers rural life, helping break the cycle of energy poverty, improve incomes and quality of life while contributing to economic growth.
Boomitra
Winner of The Earthshot Prize in 2023, Boomitra incentivises land restoration and improves farmer incomes through satellite-verified carbon credits across India, Kenya, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Namibia, Botswana and Mongolia. Their platform addresses systemic barriers by prioritizing smallholders and women farmers who have historically been excluded from carbon markets and financial services, helping them to transition to regenerative agriculture without upfront cost.
Too many viable solutions remain stuck in the “pilot trap”, unable to scale because they fall between the cracks of traditional finance. They are too large for grants, too early for commercial capital or too fragmented to attract blended finance.
What we’ve seen across geographies and sectors is this: financial inclusion isn’t just a social good, it’s a scaling strategy.
When small-scale fishers, female farmers, or off-grid households have access to capital, digital tools, and markets, they become not just beneficiaries of climate solutions, but the ones deploying and accelerating them.
Financial inclusion, for example, can enable the aggregation of small producers into investable networks. These can strengthen resilience through diversified income and insurance mechanisms, expand market access for those historically excluded from global value chains, and foster ownership and agency, laying the foundation for greater uptake, durability, and impact.
It also opens up market access for those historically excluded from global value chains, and fosters ownership and agency – critical ingredients for increasing uptake, durability, and long-term impact.
Put simply: we cannot scale climate adaptation without scaling access.
As Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Earthshot Prize Council Member, writes in her foreword to the report:
“It is not innovation that is lacking. It is investment readiness. It is access to capital. It is risk appetite. And above all, it is speed.”
d.light enables energy access in Africa by providing and financing affordable solar solutions to people without access to electricity.
Our report lays out a new framework for unlocking capital for climate and economic resilience, one rooted in aggregation, de-risking, and inclusive ecosystem design.
What we need isn’t just more capital, but better capital. Capital that’s patient enough to support early-stage infrastructure, and innovation and blended to crowd in private investment through strategic public and philanthropic risk-taking.
It must be distributed to local innovators closest to the opportunity, and inclusive by design — valuing jobs, gender equity, and long-term resilience and prosperity alongside emissions reductions.
“There is no trade-off between prosperity and climate ambition,” Dr. Ngozi reminds us. “If we design for it, they can be mutually reinforcing. But the window to act is closing fast.”
We don’t lack climate solutions. What we lack is the connective tissue between these solutions and the systems that can help them scale. That’s why we champion innovations that promote shared economic prosperity, particularly those led by and designed for communities most impacted by climate and economic risks.
At The Earthshot Prize, and through this effort, this is precisely what we do: bringing together the partners needed to unlock blended finance and aggregate demand, so we can elevate local innovators from the margins of finance to the centre of systems change.
This means spotlighting replicable models like Earthshot Prize Finalists Coast 4C, Boomitra, S4S Technologies, and d.light, while helping to build pipelines of investable projects that attract the right capital to scale.
Let’s unite the partners needed to unlock blended finance and aggregate demand, so local innovators move from the periphery to the heart of transformative change.
The goal is to move from promising pilots to pathways to scale, where the tools of finance are finally fit for purpose in a world facing multiple crises at once.
If we get this right, the next decade won’t just be about hitting net-zero targets.
It will be about building a climate-resilient economy that supports millions of dignified green jobs, providing security and purpose. It will mean regenerated ecosystems and communities, restored through approaches that value both people and planet. And it’s a future where financial systems will reward long-term well-being, not just short-term returns.
At The Earthshot Prize, we believe a thriving planet and a thriving economy for people are not at odds. They’re interdependent, and inseparable.
We’re building the platforms, partnerships, and playbooks to make it happen.
Because the world doesn’t need more pledges. It needs pathways, and it needs them now.
Let’s build them. Together.
Unlocking Critical Finance for Climate and Economic Resilience offers insights from innovators and investors on the frontline of inclusive, community-led climate action.
