The 2023 Earthshot Prize winners

November 08, 2023

An agritech startup that helps female farmers in India to cut food waste using solar-powered dehydration equipment is among the five green innovations to scoop the Prince of Wales’ prestigious Earthshot Prize.

The winners of the annual eco-awards were revealed on Tuesday evening at a star-studded ceremony at the Theatre at MediaCorp in Singapore.

Each will walk away with £1 million (around $1.2 million) to scale up their pioneering projects.

Prince William and his Royal Foundation launched the ambitious 10-year initiative in 2020, with the goal of funding 50 solutions to some of the planet’s most urgent environmental problems by 2030.

Prince William’s 2023 Earthshot Prize winners announced
This year’s winners were chosen from a shortlist of 15 finalists by Prince William and the Earthshot Prize Council, chaired by Christiana Figueres, a former UN climate chief, who played a key role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Other members of the judging panel include Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, activist Ernest Gibson and Alibaba founder Jack Ma among others.

The competition is based around five “Earthshots,” or environmental goals. This year’s winners are:

• Protect and Restore Nature: Acción Andina, from Peru. The grassroots project is working in South America to protect native forest ecosystems across the Andes.

• Clean Our Air: GRST, from Hong Kong. The start-up has developed a new process for making and recycling lithium-ion batteries, paving the way “to make the electric cars of the future even cleaner.”

• Revive Our Oceans: WildAid Marine Program, a global organization with US-based headquarters. The non-profit combines “partnership building and knowledge sharing” to support the planet’s ocean conservation needs.

• Build a Waste-Free World: S4S Technologies from India. The agritech start-up uses its solar-powered dehydration equipment to cut food waste and help farmers process excess crops into products with a longer shelf life.

• Fix Our Climate: Boomitra, a global organization with US-based headquarters. The company is “removing emissions and boosting farmer profits by incentivizing land restoration” through the creation of its soil carbon marketplace.

Nidhi Pant, co-founder of S4S Technologies, told CNN winning an Earthshot Prize would allow her company to make “bolder moves.”

WildAid Marine Program Director Emily Owen said her initiative’s win offered the conservation organization “an opportunity to reach more leaders [and] to protect more priority marine areas around the world — including vital blue carbon habitats such as mangroves and seagrasses.”