The Duke of Cambridge flies to New York next month for a climate summit on his first trip to the US since Harry and Meghan moved there.
William will make the solo trip on September 21 to attend an Earthshot Prize innovation summit which aims to amplify calls to speed up efforts to repair the planet.
The duke, who will be joined by previous winners of his £50 million global environmental competition, will make a speech alongside billionaire media mogul and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But William is unlikely to make the journey from the East Coast to the West Coast to see his brother, the Duke of Sussex.
The pair are also not expected to meet during the Sussexes’ whirlwind trip to the UK at the start of September.
It is the first time William has visited America since Harry and Meghan decamped across the Atlantic to California in March 2020 after quitting the working monarchy.
The second Earthshot Prize awards ceremony is set to be held in Boston in December, after the inaugural event at Alexandra Palace in north London last year.
Mr Bloomberg, a key backer of the Prize, said, “Accelerating the world’s climate progress requires us to take urgent, ambitious action from every angle.
“As global leaders get set to gather in New York, the Bloomberg team is working with our partners Prince William and The Earthshot Prize to showcase the most innovative climate solutions and help them spread more quickly.”
Hannah Jones, chief executive officer of the Earthshot Prize, said. “We will ask the brightest minds to turn urgent optimism into action.”
Founded by Prince William and The Royal Foundation in 2020, The Earthshot Prize aims to discover and scale up groundbreaking solutions to repair the planet.
Among the first winners were projects restoring coral reefs, redistributing unwanted food to the disadvantaged, teaching game poachers to gain farming skills and a project battling the issues contributing to air pollution in India.
Harry Potter star Emma Watson, wearing a gown made of 10 wedding dresses from Oxfam, and Dame Emma Thompson were among those who walked the “green carpet” at the first awards ceremony last October.
The Earthshot initiative was inspired by former US president John F Kennedy’s Moonshot project in 1961 which set scientists the challenge of placing an astronaut on the moon and returning him safely — and in the process helped advance humanity’s achievements.
