130 million - (⅓) + 1.3 billion - 30% = $1mil Roddenberry Prize

The 2018 Roddenberry Prize will be awarded to organizations focused on four issue areas ranked in the top 10 among Project Drawdown’s top solutions for global warming: food waste, plant-rich diets, girls’ education, and women’s rights. Four Awardees in each domain will receive $250,000 to continue to implement and scale their work.

Register no later than Thursday, July 12, 2018, at 5:00 PM Pacific. Registration is a simple two-step process. First, create a username and password and then check your inbox to confirm your registration. Next, complete the short online registration form. Once you are registered, please submit your first-round application no later than Thursday, July 26, 2018, at 5:00 PM Pacific. Be sure to take time to review all of the application requirements (including the second round questions) before starting your submission.

It’s all in the data. Project Drawdown’s analysis indicates that access to quality education coupled with gender equity, food waste reduction, and plant-rich diet have the greatest potential to slow the pace of global warming—even more than switching to solar, electric, or wind energy. According to the Brookings Institution, empowering girls and women through education and family planning is the number one way the world can address climate change.²  And evidence suggests that the combined impact of eating less meat and wasting less food would lead to a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions³. Based on multiple data sources, these four issue areas have the greatest potential to reduce global warming.

There will be two rounds of scoring (view timeline). In the first round, applications will be reviewed by five peers. During this Peer-to-Peer Review, all applicants will use the scoring rubric to score and comment on at least five other applications within their selected category: (1) Food preparation, consumption, and waste; and (2) Education and rights of women and girls. After peer review, all scores are normalized to ensure a level playing field for everyone. Up to 50 top scoring applications will be invited to submit a second-round application due in early September 2018.

In the second round, all invited submissions will receive scores and comments from a highly qualified panel of expert judges. The selection of Awardees is at the discretion of The Roddenberry Foundation with consideration of rank order, judge feedback, and factors such as geographic distribution, issue area, and capacity.

Four Awardees will receive $250,000 each to implement and scale their work. Awards will be announced in November 2018. The top organizations in each issue area that are NOT awarded a prize will be recognized publicly as Finalists.

There are few global issues that have attracted more media attention, investment, and research than the climate crisis. At the Foundation, we’re moving away from silver-bullet approaches that emphasize innovation and future technologies at the expense of what we know already works. When we learned about Project Drawdown, we found an opportunity to highlight projects that are already working and support them to scale; seek out creative approaches from diverse members of our global community; and catalyze a shift from a fractured and siloed approach to climate change, to one where the community supports and recognizes its own.

Project Drawdown is a nonprofit organization and an international coalition of scholars, scientists, entrepreneurs, and advocates from across the globe that is mapping, measuring, modeling, and communicating a collective array of substantive solutions to global warming. In 2016, Project Drawdown released Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever to Reverse Global Warmingwhich outlines the top 80 solutions to reverse global warming by 2050. 

Food waste encompasses a cross section of issues and varies in form from region to region. In developing countries, more waste happens earlier in the food chain—at farms, during storage or at distribution, while in developed countries, the majority of waste occurs at the retail and consumer level. The end result is that nearly one-third of the world’s food supply is never eaten.⁴

Learn more about key strategies to address food waste.

We don’t mean simply eating more celery and fewer hamburgers, but that’s a good start. According to Project Drawdown, there are two main pathways to a plant-rich diet: the first focuses on eating less meat, and the second aims to decrease the processed food we eat. Consumption of fresh, local food requires less CO2-generating transport, processing and packaging.

Worldwide meat production has tripled over the last four decades and increases every year.⁵ This affects our carbon footprint in astounding ways–between transporting animals, the methane gas they release, water required to feed them, and land used for the process—raising livestock accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions. If one serving of beef has more greenhouse gas emissions than 20 servings of vegetables,⁶ you can see how plant-rich diets are key to addressing climate change.

Learn more about key strategies for a plant-rich diet.

Today, 130 million girls between the ages of 6 and 17 are out of school. Over 15 million girls of primary-school age will never enter a classroom. To top it off, there are 33 million fewer girls than boys in primary school.⁷

Here’s the good news: more girls in school receiving a quality education leads to a series of significant and long-term effects that reduce the incidence of disease, increases life expectancy, delays child marriage, leads to prosperity, and results in more agency in adulthood. This is the key: better educated girls often grow up to be more empowered women who have more freedom to make better choices—choices that positively affect the environment.

Learn more about key strategies to improving girls’ education.

It might be 2018, but women are still systematically discriminated against in virtually every single domain of life, from healthcare and education, to political representation and the workforce. Not only will a woman earn about 82% of what her male counterpart will earn, she is also twice more likely to be illiterate than a man.⁸ To make matters worse, the impact of climate change—drought, migration and displacement, soil erosion, and severe weather—affects women far more negatively and in disproportionate ways.

Learn more about key strategies to increasing women’s rights.

Absolutely! We highly encourage new and/or existing efforts that showcase cross-sector partnerships, collaboration, or team-based work.