It must be tough being a judge on the world’s most prestigious environmental prize: imagine having to choose between an ingenious machine that removes microplastics from a river in Europe, or a company in East Africa that sells clean cookstoves through affordable weekly instalments.
Over the last six months, we have been working with colleagues at Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter to make that job a little easier. We have found a way to distinguish between solutions that carry on working as long as people keep putting money into them, and those with “tipping potential” that get better, cheaper and easier to adopt the more successful they are. Our new report applies the science of positive tipping points to the five Earthshot categories – nature, air, oceans, waste and climate – for the first time.
