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A multimillion dollar award. Three years. Your strategy.

Who We Fund

We fund people, not projects or organizations. We’re looking for highly motivated, innovative, strategic, and tenacious individuals or teams (small teams, two to four people) with a record of success.

Awardees must be breakthrough thinkers who can envision and implement solutions with global impact and push beyond what others consider possible. While candidates may not know the exact strategy they will pursue with their award, the expectation is that they will have at least a few potential ideas ready to explore.

Qualities We Seek

Willingness to reject conventional wisdom and typical approaches in the field.

Experience setting and committing to audacious goals.

Minimal concern with personal ambition, but intense focus on the big goal.

Ability to create complex strategies with many stakeholders, participants, and tactics.

Capacity to embrace a “right to left approach”—starting with a big ultimate goal and developing a plan to meet it instead of merely pursuing the next step in an existing incremental strategy.

Big ideas are not enough

We’re looking for people with a demonstrated ability to make things happen and get results.

Awardees will have a proven record of “creating something where there was nothing.” We look for people and teams who have demonstrated tenacity, perseverance, and an enterprising nature.

Not every past endeavor has to have been a success, yet strong candidates will have a track record of testing, experimenting, and iterating in order to improve their approach. We’re looking for people who have proved they can create and build in the real world.

Environmental activism

What Counts as a Breakthrough?

The strategies that awardees pursue will, if successful, lead to tangible changes that reduce (or capture) greenhouse gas emissions on a globally meaningful scale—changes that could reduce global annual emissions by hundreds of megatons of CO2e within five to ten years. For most awardees, this will mean pursuing strategies that affect entire industries or countries and materially change the lives of millions of people.

Selection Process

Awardees must be nominated by a scout in the Climate Breakthrough network. Scouts identify hundreds of potential candidates each year through their networks across the globe. Each year we select two to four awardees on a rolling basis.

Awards

Awardees will receive a multimillion dollar grant over three years to develop and pursue scalable strategies of their own design.

In addition to funding, award recipients will receive tailored resources and assistance to bolster the creation, launch, and scaling of their strategies. Climate Breakthrough is a global initiative: candidates for the award may be based anywhere in the world and they need not speak English.

Climate Breakthrough Awardees

Extraordinary people striving to create historic climate change mitigation breakthroughs.

Tessa Khan

Tessa began her work as an awardee focused on using the law as a tool to dramatically increase national climate mitigation ambition. The Climate Litigation Network (CLN), which she co-founded,
Award Year 2018

Bruce Nilles

Founder and lead strategist of the Beyond Coal Campaign, before receiving his Climate Breakthrough Award, Bruce’s efforts secured the retirement of over half the United States’ coal fleet. When selected
Award Year 2018
Nicole Rycroft

Nicole Rycroft

Nicole Rycroft is an accomplished environmental activist, an Ashoka Fellow, and, unusually, a former physiotherapist and elite rower. A systems thinker, she confronts the world’s rapid and dangerous destruction of
Award Year 2020

Yang Fuqiang

Fuqiang finished his Climate Breakthrough tenure this year. Selected in 2017, he used his award to mainstream within the policy and business circles the idea of capping oil consumption in
Award Year 2017

May Mei

May is the founder of GoalBlue, a Chinese startup NGO that aims to spark lasting low-carbon dietary and lifestyle trends among China’s rapidly growing middle class, urban, and millennial populations.
Award Year 2016

John Hepburn

John is Executive Director of The Sunrise Project. He used his Climate Breakthrough Award to launch Insure Our Future, a global campaign to hold the insurance industry accountable for its
Award Year 2016

Nguy Thi Khanh

Nguy Thi Khanh is a pioneer leader of Vietnam’s environmental movement and has played an instrumental role in shifting Vietnam from coal and towards renewables and energy efficiency. Khanh’s breakthrough
Award Year 2019

Sebastián Kind

As the Undersecretary for Renewable Energy in Argentina, Sebastián was the architect and primary driver of Argentina’s RenovAr program, which has attracted over $7.4 billion USD in clean energy investments resulting
Award Year 2019

Arief Rabik

Arief Rabik is the director of Indonesia’s Environmental Bamboo Foundation and the founder of the 1000 Bamboo Villages project, which aims to create economic viability for the use of bamboo
Award Year 2019
Mohamed Adow

Mohamed Adow

Mohamed Adow is an international climate policy expert and ardent advocate for the people of developing nations—who are disproportionately affected by climate change but play almost no role in causing
Award Year 2020

Tzeporah Berman

Tzeporah Berman has a long record of leading and winning major environmental campaigns and negotiating significant policy victories. Now she is focused on curtailing the global oil and gas supply.
Award Year 2019
All Awardees

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