The Earthshot Prize has announced today that its first-ever awards ceremony is to take place on Sunday 17 October at the iconic Alexandra Palace in London, with other famous landmarks across the UK’s capital city also part of the historic event.
Broadcast to a global audience, the inaugural awards ceremony will celebrate the incredible global Finalists before awarding the first five Winners of The Earthshot Prize. These winning solutions will have the greatest impact on the biggest environmental challenges facing our planet and each awardee will receive £1 million to scale their solutions.
The London ceremony will be accompanied by show-stopping performances as well as never-before-seen musical collaborations. It will be broadcast in the UK on BBC One as well as globally with a major broadcast partner. As part of this worldwide TV event, viewers will have the chance to meet the individuals and teams whose solutions have the power to help repair the planet and improve life for people everywhere.
Inspired by President Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’, The Earthshot Prize is an ambitious global environmental prize which aims to discover and scale the best solutions to help repair our planet over the next 10 years. Every year from 2021 until 2030, The Earthshot Prize will find and reward inclusive solutions to five ‘Earthshot’ goals – Protect and restore nature; Clean our air; Revive our oceans; Build a waste-free world; and Fix our climate.
Over the past six months, The Earthshot Prize, in collaboration with its Global Alliance network of over 200 Nominators, has been searching the world – from businesses to governments, grassroots initiatives and more – for solutions to these challenges and identifying a final set of astounding innovations from every corner of the globe. The Finalists will be announced in September and the official Prize Winners will be selected by The Earthshot Prize Council, an international team of influential individuals with a variety of backgrounds, including Prince William, Sir David Attenborough, Dr.Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Shakira, Luisa Neubauer and Cate Blanchett. Prize winners will each receive a £1 million prize fund and tailored support to scale their solutions and realise an even greater impact of their ground-breaking work.
This announcement comes just ahead of London Climate Action Week, taking place between the 26th June – 4th July, where London will host the largest independent climate festival in Europe, bringing together world-leading climate thinkers, professionals and communities to harness the power of London for global climate action.
Prince William announced the inaugural Prize event in a new short film captured by a drone camera in front of the famous Alexandra Palace Rose Window and across the London skyline.
Across the decade-long lifespan of The Earthshot Prize, nine more international cities will be transformed into Earthshot venues, showcasing the worldwide impact of the Prize and profiling the incredible people working to repair out planet. By the end of the decade, ten global ceremonies will award fifty incredible winners with The Earthshot Prize.