The Keeling Curve Prize has announced its 2019 award winners.

Announced at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival, the ten winners — two in each of five categories — will receive $25,000 each to advance projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or promote carbon uptake. Selected from more than a hundred and fifty applicants and twenty finalists announced earlier this year, the winners also will receive networking and outreach support.

In the category of carbon capture and utilization, this year's awardees are Opus 12 (Berkeley, California), a company that is developing a device that recycles CO₂ into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels, and WILDCOAST (Imperial Beach, California), a nonprofit working to secure a resilient coastline in the Gulf of California. In the energy access category, the winners are Solar Sister (Great Falls, Virginia), a nonprofit that invests in women-led enterprises in off-grid communities in Africa, and African Clean Energy (Lesotho), a social enterprise that provides emission-friendly cookstoves and solar electricity for small electronics and LED lighting. And in the finance category, the awardees are Clean Energy Works (Washington, D.C.), a nonprofit whose pay-as-you-save financing helps transportation companies transition to electric buses, and CalCEF/Nexus (Oakland, California), which is forming a Qualified Clean Energy Opportunity Zone Fund with the aim of accelerating the deployment of solar, wind, energy storage, and other clean economy assets in the Bay Area.

In the category of social and cultural impacts, the winners are the World Council of Churches (Geneva), which is working with houses of worship to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through youth engagement, and Science Based Targets (global), which helps financial institutions align their investment and lending portfolios with the Paris climate accord. And in the transportation category, the winners are Jetty (Mexico City), which uses technology to enforce stricter service standards for private "colectivo" services in Mexico City, and Three Wheels United (Bangalore, India), a fintech company working to decarbonize the auto rickshaw market.

Established in 2017, the prize is named for an iconic graph that illustrates the accumulation of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since the 1950s as measured by Charles David Keeling, who started the CO₂ monitoring program at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The prize is funded by its co-founder Mike Klein, board chair of Costar Group and founder, board chair, and CEO of the Sunlight Foundation.

"From many seeds, solutions grow, and we're proud to 'water the grass,'" said Keeling Curve Prize co-founder and director Jacquelyn Francis. "We need a diversity of approaches to flourish so that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, remove them from our atmosphere, and protect our planet for ourselves and our children."