The San Francisco-based Climate Breakthrough has announced the recipients of its 2022 Climate Breakthrough Award, which supports climate mitigation efforts considered too ambitious or early-stage by traditional funders.

Each winner receives a multiyear grant of $3 million as well as capacity-building resources to create or scale climate mitigation work. This year’s recipients are Isabel Cavelier Adarve (Colombia), who helped create the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC) and plans to help new, emerging, and existing climate leaders in the region escalate change and develop broad strategies to get civil society more engaged in their government’s climate commitments; James Irungu Mwangi (Kenya), co-founder and executive director of Dalberg, who aims to accelerate a budding, multi-pronged initiative he recently started to leverage Africa’s socio-environmental assets and turn them into a driver of climate action and economic transformation in the continent; and the first-ever team of recipients—Vinuta Gopal, Sanjiv Gopal, and Brikesh Singh (India)—who plan to expand their “collaborative, networked, and unbranded” approach, which has proven fruitful in elevating sub-national efforts toward reaching India’s climate goals.

Launched in 2016 and funded by the David and Lucile Packard, IKEA, Quadrature Climate, Good Energies, Vere, and JPB foundations, the Climate Breakthrough Award has supported 16 individuals and one team of three across 13 countries with gifts totaling more than $51 million.

“We look for extraordinary leaders with big ideas for climate action that have not been tried before—ideas with the potential to transform entire industries or countries and materially change the lives of millions of people,” said Climate Breakthrough executive director Savanna Ferguson. “This year’s award recipients are exactly such leaders, and they share a commitment not only to addressing the climate crisis at scale, but to doing so in ways that will improve the lives of and opportunities for the people in the communities most affected by this crisis.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Andrea Migliarini)