The Earthshot Prize has announced the inaugural winners of its global competition for groundbreaking scalable solutions to five of the greatest environmental challenges facing the planet.

Established by the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with the goal of incentivizing change and helping repair the planet over the next ten years, the Earthshot Prize will provide each award recipient £1 million ($1.37 million) in prize money. The five winners and ten other finalists also will receive tailored professional and technical support from the Earthshot Prize Global Alliance — a network of philanthropies, NGOs, and private-sector businesses — to help scale their solutions and accelerate their impact.

The winner in the category of "protect and restore nature" is the Republic of Costa Rica, which is expanding government programs that pay citizens to protect forests, plant trees, and restore ecosystems. In the categories of "clean our air" and "revive our oceans," the winners are Boston-based Takachar, which has developed a portable technology that enables tractors in remote farms in India to convert crop residues into bio-products such as fuel and fertilizer and reduces smoke emissions by up to 98 percent, and Bahamas-based Coral Vita, which grows coral on land to replant in oceans, helping to revive dying ecosystems and improve resilience to the impact of climate change. And in the categories of "build a waste-free world" and "fix our climate," the winners are the City of Milan’s Food Waste Hubs, which recover and donate food from supermarkets and company canteens to NGOs that distribute it to the neediest residents, and Enapter, whose AEM Electrolyser technology turns renewable electricity into emissions-free hydrogen gas.

For a complete list of winners and finalists, see the Earthshot Prize website.

(Photo credit: Earthshot Prize)