The San Francisco-based Climate Breakthrough Project has announced the recipients of its 2021 Climate Breakthrough Award for cutting-edge climate change mitigation ideas that have yet to be funded by traditional funders.

The winners, who for the first time since the award was launched in 2016 are all women, will each receive $3 million to design and implement their breakthrough climate change strategies. The recipients are the Emerald Cities Collaborative president and CEO Denise Fairchild (United States), a veteran leader in environmental justice, who will work to dismantle the root causes of climate change by prompting large and enduring cultural shifts in energy consumption norms and disrupting the foundation of America’s fossil-fuel dependent economy; Kathrin Gutmann (Germany), campaign director of the Europe Beyond Coal Campaign, a network of NGOs working to move the continent beyond that fossil fuel by 2030, who plans to ensure that Europe is 100 percent powered by renewable energy by 2035; and Financial Futures Center founder Sara Jane Ahmed (Philippines), who serves as finance advisor to the finance ministers of the Vulnerable Twenty (V20), the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, and who aims to catalyze economic transformation by developing and implementing a package of policies and financial mechanisms to spur investments in financial and energy planning in the forty most climate-vulnerable developing countries by 2030.

Funded by the Good Energies, IKEA, JPB, Oak, David and Lucile Packard, and Quadrature Climate foundations, the project has supported eleven other climate activists, many of whom were involved in COP26 events and negotiations in Glasgow.

(Photo credit: Breakthrough Climate Project)