How generous are the Earthshot Prize’s billionaire backers compared to those of its peers?
Since I called Earthshot a publicity campaign in an op-ed last week, I’ve been thinking about the major environmental prizes I’ve covered in four years reporting on climate philanthropy: the Goldman Prize, Climate Breakthrough, the Audacious Project (and its green awardees), and Yield Giving’s Open Call.
It’s hard to compare any two prizes, but one quick metric is money. It’s not perfect, but it’s a starting point. So I gathered the numbers and calculated how much each of the above competitions awards per named backer. While some funders are obviously contributing more to a given competition than others, to me, that’s the best measure of a competition’s overall generosity.
For anyone uninitiated in these contests, this list also serves as an introduction to these five competitions — which deserve attention in their own right, despite prize philanthropy’s many and varied flaws — and how they go about their work.
Of course, money is only one thing that winners and nominees receive from any prize. Earthshot, as past winners and nominators have pointed out, also provides a lot of behind-the-scenes support for its grantees. (Want to tell me about how those helped your organization? Get in touch.)
But virtually all of these prizes do similar work. For instance, the Goldman Prize holds bicoastal award galas, provides ongoing support for winners to attend conferences and do professional development, and helps ensure the safety of award winners with assistance from PR to pro bono legal defense, among other services. Another competition, Climate Breakthrough, has services for awardees that span executive coaching, professional trainings and targeted help on topics like communications, development and organizational design, as well as a community of nearly 50 representatives from major funders around the globe that help grantees to learn and develop their vision.
Then there’s publicity — which is, granted, a big boon of Prince William’s project. Only Goldman and Audacious seem to hold a candle to the conflagration of coverage generated by Earthshot. The former is known to feature Nancy Pelosi at its San Francisco award ceremonies, and past attendees have included Lenny Kravitz, Al Gore and Dr. Jane Goodall, while the latter’s laundry list of megadonors (most of whom attend its final event, according to organizers) shines brightly on its own. I don’t have the numbers (yet), but I suspect Earthshot racks up the most earned media of all. It’s hard to compete with the mania for the royal family.
This list is, necessarily, only a sampling of a big field. There are a lot more smaller contests, for instance, including the Keeling Curve Prize ($500,000), the Tyler Prize ($250,000), Innovate 4 Nature (~$116,000), and the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award ($100,000). There have been still more limited-life awards, like the Indonesian Peat Prize and New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize.
Thus, I have focused on the biggest prizes, because those usually receive the most attention, and they are most comparable to Earthshot. I’ve also calculated these totals based on the number of named funders for each competition, with the caveat that there may be backers involved who haven’t been named publicly.
Finally, I’ve added an estimate of how many living billionaires are among each competition’s supporters, based on the Forbes list and other public information, and counting couples and families as individuals, per standard IP practice. In other words, a shorthand for exactly how many of the Earth’s richest people are putting their names — and in some cases serious money — behind these contests.
Goldman Prize: Recognizing grassroots environmental activists
Funder: Goldman Environmental Foundation
Dollars awarded per funder: More than $1 million (in recent years)
Billionaire backers: None
Founded in 1989, this annual award recognizes six grassroots environmental activists, one from each of six geographic regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America and Central and South America. It’s sometimes called the green Nobel prize, and at least one former Goldman awardee, Wangarĩ Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in the ’70s, went on to win the actual Nobel Prize. Others have gone on to become heads of state and top government officials. Some, like Berta Cáceres of Honduras, have been killed for their activism.
In recent years, the prize has favored leaders of environmental resistance. This year, for instance, awards went to activists who led campaigns that blocked development of coal mines in Australia and India, stopped seismic testing for oil and gas off the coast of South Africa, and exposed how the world’s largest meatpacking company contributed to deforestation in Brazil. The Goldman team requests that publications not publish the current award amount due to the threats recipients face.
Climate Breakthrough: Big awards to individuals with big ideas
Funders: David and Lucile Packard Foundation, IKEA Foundation, JPB Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, Oceankind, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Vere Initiatives
Dollars awarded per funder: ~$2 million (2024)
Billionaire backers: At least two
Since its launch in 2016, Climate Breakthrough has given unrestricted awards to two or three climate leaders annually. But this year, there are four awardees, each receiving $3.5 million. One aim is to provide a vehicle for often risk-averse philanthropies to back high-risk, high-reward opportunities — as such, this particular award tends to be based on potential rather than past accomplishments. Another goal is backing individuals who might not win support through traditional channels. More than 60% of its funding has gone to women or women-led teams, and that same share has had a global or Global South focus.
Last year, prizes went to Gita Syahrani, who has led multiple coalitions to expand environmental action in Indonesia, and Jane Fleming Kleeb, who has helped to bring together farmers, ranchers, indigenous leaders and climate activists in the rural U.S. Measured by money, these winners are going places. Since its launch, awardees have received more than $236 million in subsequent funding, or an average of $12.4 million per winner. The prize is awarded through a nomination and evaluation process, not an open call. In other words, only nonprofits under serious consideration spend any time filling in an application.
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Audacious Project: A billionaire prize that puts winners in a new ‘weight division’
Funders: ~40 foundations and individuals
Dollars awarded per funder: ~$22 million (2023)
Billionaire backers: Approximately 30
Before being chosen by Audacious, the largest grant the environmental nonprofit Canopy had ever received was a five-year, $5 million grant from the Laudes Foundation. (Still far more substantial than an Earthshot award.) But what it received from Audacious — $60 million over six years — moved the nonprofit “up a weight division, or maybe even two,” according to its founder and executive director, Nicole Rycroft, who is a former Climate Breakthrough winner.
Unlike the prizes mentioned above, Audacious is not focused on environmental issues. But such awards account for about half of its recent winners, by my count. Even more than Earthshot, it has a massive list of public backers — and a few more anonymous ones. Yet Audacious donors — about three-quarters of whom are on the Forbes billionaires list, by my count — are at least putting substantial money on the table. In 2021, Audacious would have been one of the top five green grantmakers in the U.S., based on my tracking. And the numbers below are actually a minimum. Audacious donors awarded $908 million at its annual gala in February 2023 — the amount used above — and those funders and others have subsequently given winners another $572 million.
Yield Giving Open Call
Funder: MacKenzie Scott
Dollars awarded per funder: $640 million
Billionaire backers: One
The story is already near-legend: In March 2023, the billionaire philanthropist and novelist MacKenzie Scott launched a competition for 250 awards of $1 million, run by Lever for Change. After receiving 6,535 applications, Scott chose to give twice as much — $2 million — to 279 organizations, and $1 million to another 82 organizations. At least 40 groups self-reported green priorities, with the largest number naming environmental justice. In all, Scott awarded $640 million, or more than twice as much money as announced. Imagine that.
Of course, the precedent-shattering philanthropist beats the pants off most every other billionaire out there — by speed, volume, lack of restrictions and other measures. So let’s look at a more representative example, also run by Lever for Change.
2030 Climate Challenge
Funder: One anonymous donor
Dollars awarded per funder: $10 million
Billionaire backers: Unknown
Launched in 2020, this competition ended the next year with the money going to Renewable Thermal Collaborative, a joint project of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, David Gardiner and Associates and World Wildlife Fund. While I believe giving at this scale — and definitely above it — warrants transparency, this competition shows that individual donors can, and do, take big swings at problems they truly care about.
How does all this compare to Earthshot? Let’s run the numbers
Funders: Aga Khan Development Network, Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Breakthrough Energy Foundation, Coleman Family Ventures, DP World in partnership with Dubai EXPO 2020, Eleven Eleven Foundation, Giving | Grousbeck Fazzalari, Holch Povlsen Foundation, Jack Ma Foundation, Law Family Charitable Foundation, Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, Marc and Lynne Benioff, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Rob Walton Foundation, Sandy and Paul Edgerley, Standard Chartered Bank, Temasek Trust and Uber (a total of 18)
Dollars awarded per funder: ~$363,512
Billionaire backers: At least 12
How to put that figure in proper context? Compared to the Goldman Prize — which has the lowest amount awarded per funder of any other on my list — Earthshot gives just one-third as much. Put it alongside the other billionaire-dominated prize, Audacious, and Earthshot awards 60 times less money per backer. Line Earthshot up against Scott’s open call, and each sponsor is granting just 0.057% as much. And the British pound recently hit a roughly two-year high against the dollar, so these figures are actually conservative.
Another good comparison is to other givers. As I noted in my recent op-ed, Rihanna gave nearly as much in one year to environmental justice groups — $15 million in 2022 — as Prince William and his 19 backers have to Earthshot Prize winners to date.
Al Gore offers another counterpoint. When the former vice president jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, he actually donated all the money received to the environmental nonprofit he founded, Alliance for Climate Protection. The total was reportedly $750,000 — or twice what Earthshot awards per funder. Greta Thunberg did the same in 2020 for a €1 million award. She is, in case you’ve forgotten, just 21 years old.
In sum, the Earthshot Prize provides winners fewer dollars per funder than every other major environmental competition out there. That’s despite having more billionaire backers per dollar given than any contest on that list.
Put another way, the heir to the British throne, seven other billionaires, four centibillionaires and a few of the most powerful companies on Earth are all but putting pennies in the pot for their moonshot, but they are generating more publicity than their peers. Is that all we should ask of this future monarch and Forbes list lineup?
Moreover, given how much publicity they generate for their grantees, and how important such attention is to promising young organizations shooting for the moon, why limit the attention to just five winners? Isn’t that a missed opportunity, both for the thousands of runners-up and our chances of preserving a habitable planet?
