Home › Affiliations › The Earthshot Prize

The Earthshot Prize: what it is and what it signals

The Earthshot Prize selects 15 Finalists and five Winners each year across five environmental goals, and each Winner receives £1 million. There is no public application form: solutions reach the prize through a network of Official Nominators. Winner and Finalist are separate claims, both recorded on one public listing, and both fixed to the year they were awarded.

Type

Awards and prizes

Run by

The Earthshot Prize

Since

2021

Headquarters

United Kingdom

Official site

https://earthshotprize.org/the-prize/about/

Public list

https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/all/

What The Earthshot Prize is

The prize is built around five goals it calls Earthshots: Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-free World, and Fix Our Climate, each set against a 2030 target. Every year the prize selects 15 solutions as Earthshot Prize Finalists, and its Prize Council then names five of them as Winners, one per Earthshot.

Recognition attaches to a solution, not to an organisation as a whole, and the recipients are not all companies. The prize says it selects "from indigenous communities and forward-thinking cities to innovative technologies, bold policymakers, pioneering businesses and international coalitions", and cities appear in its listing alongside enterprises and nonprofits.

Who runs it and since when

The prize was "Founded by HRH Prince William in 2020", who "launched The Earthshot Prize after two years of work with The Royal Foundation". It is based in the United Kingdom and led by a Board of Trustees with Prince William as Founder and President, Jesper Brodin as Chair and David Fein as Vice Chair.

Its public listing covers annual editions from 2021 to 2025, and the 2026 Summit and Awards go to Mumbai in November. The prize describes its mission as finding, celebrating and scaling solutions "that will repair our planet by 2030", so the programme is time bound to this decade. Support comes through a Global Alliance of partners including philanthropies, nonprofits, government agencies, investors and businesses.

How an organisation gets it

Selection starts with nomination, not application. The prize works with a published network of Official Nominators, and its directory flags the ones accepting open calls, which is the only route an organisation can put itself forward through. Candidate solutions "must have proven prototypes, show signs of success, and have the potential to make a positive impact on the environment", so early ideas are out of scope.

The stages are public. "From the thousands of nominations we receive each year, with vital support from our Expert Advisory Panel ... we go through a process to first identify a Top 150 and then a Top 15. These Top 15 candidates become Earthshot Prize Finalists. It is then down to our distinguished Prize Council members to choose the five Finalists that will ultimately be named as Earthshot Prize Winners." Each Winner receives "the catalytic £1 million Earthshot Prize", and all 15 Finalists enter the Earthshot Fellowship, a year of support described as unlocking financial, networking and partnership opportunities.

What it signals, and what it does not

An Earthshot record says a panel picked this solution in one year, against that year's criteria, out of that year's nominations. It is a strong selection signal, because the prize screens for proven deployment rather than promise, and for Winners it carries £1 million. It is a point-in-time judgement, not an audit: nothing about governance, finances or current delivery is certified, and there is no renewal or re-check.

Winner and Finalist are different claims and both are published, so a Finalist should not be described as a Winner. Both tiers get the Fellowship year; only Winners get the money. The prize recognises one solution, so an organisation with several lines of work was judged on the one it was nominated for.

How to verify a claim

One public listing carries every Winner and Finalist, with filters for year, Earthshot, impact area and keyword, and there is a page per edition from 2021 onward. A record shows the name, the year, the Earthshot, and whether it was a Winner or a Finalist. Check the year and the tier, not just the name.

There is no lapsed or expired state to look for: records stay listed and describe the year they were made, so the year is what dates a claim. If a name does not appear, ask whether the relationship was a nomination that did not reach the shortlist, a Global Alliance partner role, or an Official Nominator listing, none of which is a Winner or Finalist claim. Nominators are published on their own page and are easy to confuse with recipients.

Size and geography

The Earthshot Prize publishes a total of 25 Winners, 75 Finalists. Source.

Our copy of the public list holds 5 organizations across 5 countries, pulled 2026-09-14.

• Indonesia 1
• Malaysia 1
• Peru 1
• Philippines 1
• Thailand 1

In the Tokens for Good directory

None of the organizations researched so far carries this label. Submit one, or contribute research with spare Claude capacity.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. The Earthshot Prize, About checked 2026-09-17
2. The Earthshot Prize, How The Earthshot Prize works checked 2026-09-17
3. The Earthshot Prize, Winners and Finalists checked 2026-09-17
4. The Earthshot Prize, Winners and Finalists listing checked 2026-09-17
5. The Earthshot Prize, Official Nominators checked 2026-09-17
6. The Earthshot Prize, President and Board of Trustees checked 2026-09-17
7. The Earthshot Prize, Impact checked 2026-09-17