Urgent action is needed to accelerate innovation

The science is clear: we need to cut global carbon emissions to limit the worst impacts of climate change and adapt to a changing world.

The urgency of this problem creates a resounding call to action to accelerate innovation to meet our emissions targets whilst building global communities’ resilience to the worst consequences of a changing climate. Despite the undeniable need, the multiplicity of the problems we face, and the many brilliant individuals and institutions working to solve these problems, we risk failing to develop, test and scale profoundly transformational solutions that will help planet Earth and its inhabitants tackle the climate crisis.

• We need to challenge innovators to tackle the world’s biggest crisis with bold calls to action centred around clear goals – because we don’t have time to take modest, piecemeal steps.

• We need to support new and different actors, including people and organisations from outside the environmental sector with unexpected approaches and radical ideas – because we’re wasting talent by overlooking good ideas and there’s no excuse for wasting talent in an emergency. • We need to reward and nurture the most promising ideas – because we don’t have the time or resources to spend on anything that is not moving the needle forward.

• We need to support a diversity of solutions that can achieve systemic change – because solutions are more resilient and effective if they work in tandem to tackle problems from different angles.

• We need to create pathways for the best solutions to rapidly scale – because funding one-off solutions will never achieve global impact.

To meet the scale and urgency of this crisis, funders – whether public, non-governmental or private – must take a courageous approach to not only what but how they fund. We have agreed that we need to devote at least $100 billion a year to climate finance – and that is just a fraction of what is truly required – but these targets have not been met. Not only do we need to increase financing, but also need to prioritise how funding is deployed and remove barriers to access.1 Before defaulting to the same old approaches and funding mechanisms, it is imperative that funders ask themselves:

• How can we most effectively support the creation of breakthrough solutions?

• What do we need to do to quickly and effectively test promising solutions so that we can drive adoption and transfer?

• How can we supercharge the process to enable urgently needed solutions to scale? In the following pages we set out the gaps in climate innovation problem-solving. As challengedriven innovation experts, we articulate the role that challenge prizes can play in a funder’s portfolio to advance net zero emissions and reduce the harmful effects of climate change – particularly for our most vulnerable communities.

Closing the climate funding gap is not enough; we must also think critically about how funding is deployed to deliver the transformative change we need.

1. E. Ares and P. Loft, COP26: Delivering on $100 billion climate finance. UK Parliament:

House of Commons Library, (2021).