Prince William to present Earthshot Prize in Mumbai on November 17; two Indians among finalists

Prince William will attend the sixth Earthshot Prize ceremony in Mumbai on November 17. CEO Jason Knauf announced this at a press conference. The prince of the British royal family started the prize to promote climate solutions. This year's ceremony will celebrate India's leadership, conservation and culture.

This year, 15 solutions have been shortlisted in five categories, involving 20 people. Each of the five winners will receive 1 million pounds.

Two names from India are on the final list. Suman Mishra, MD and CEO of Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, has been shortlisted in the "Clean Our Air" category. She has been chosen for building affordable electric rickshaws. Bijal Brahmbhatt, executive director of the Mahila Housing Trust, is nominated in the "Fix Our Climate" category. She has been chosen for helping vulnerable Indian communities cope with extreme heat.

In the "Protect and Restore Nature" category are Bhutan's Princess Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck and forest officer Karma Tenzin. They are protecting Himalayan forests that sustain the water systems of 1.6 billion people in South Asia.

Also in this category is Sam Murray, CEO of The Indigenous Alliance. He supports rangers who look after 270 million hectares of desert in Australia. Dr Jodi Hilty, president and chief scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, and Chief Harlan Schilling have been nominated for reconnecting 3,400 km of wild land in Canada and the US.

In the "Build a Waste-Free World" category is Sonia Mendoza of the Mother Earth Foundation in the Philippines. She works with informal workers to remove single-use plastic before it reaches dumps, rivers and beaches.

French parliamentarian Nicolas Thierry and Maria Pelletier, president of Generation Futures, are also in this category. They built a cross-party movement to ban toxic forever chemicals in consumer products and to make polluters pay for clean-up. Kim Mi-hwa, president of the South Korea Zero Waste Network, has been chosen for helping raise food waste recycling in South Korea from 2 per cent in the mid-1990s to 95 per cent.

The Earthshot Prize is a global environmental prize. It was launched in 2020 by Prince William and The Royal Foundation. Its aim is to find, recognise and scale up new solutions that repair and protect the planet. It is inspired by President John F Kennedy's "moonshot" and runs over a decade of action from 2020 to 2030.

Each year the prize picks 15 finalists and five winners, one for each of five global goals. The goals are: protecting and restoring nature, so that the natural world grows rather than shrinks by 2030; clean air for everyone to breathe; improving and protecting marine life and ecology in the oceans; a waste-free world, meaning a circular economy in which nothing is wasted; and fixing the climate, meaning cutting carbon to build a carbon-neutral economy.