South Asia Shines Bright at the Earthshot Prize 2025

Every year, the Earthshot Prize shifts the global climate conversation from problem to possibility. Established in 2020 by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough, it is one of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards. Its mission is simple yet bold: find, fund, and scale five breakthrough solutions capable of achieving ambitious “Earthshots” by 2030—Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate.

Each year, from over a thousand nominations, experts shortlist 15 finalists, and five winners receive £1 million each to scale their innovations. Beyond the prize money, Earthshot offers global visibility, mentorship, and access to investors, engineers, and partners, to transform promising  ideas into global movements.

In 2025, the winners included Brazilian ReGreen (Protect & Restore Nature), the City of Bogotá (Clean Our Air), the High Seas Treaty (Revive Our Oceans), Lagos Fashion Week (Build a Waste-Free World) and Friendship from Bangladesh (Fix Our Climate).

South Asia stood out, with a major win for Bangladesh and an impressive finalist position for India.

Bangladesh’s Friendship: A Win for Climate-Adaptation Leadership

Friendship, a Bangladeshi NGO that won the ‘Fix Our Climate’ category proved that the most powerful climate solutions often emerge from the communities facing the harshest realities.

In Bangladesh’s increasingly fragile delta regions, Friendship has been quietly transforming lives–building dismantlable, relocatable schools, floating hospitals, and raised plinths to adapt to rising water levels. Its mangrove afforestation programme is the largest privately led initiative of its kind in Bangladesh.

Friendship has an integrated approach, spanning healthcare, education, livelihoods, and disaster preparedness. Their model is rooted in community ownership, long-term resilience planning, and climate justice, a formula that resonates across South Asia, where climate threats increasingly transcend borders.

India’s Gujarat: A Policy Model that Captured Global Attention

India, too, earned its moment on the world stage as Gujarat became a finalist in the ‘Clean Our Air’ category for its Emissions Trading Scheme.

The scheme caps particulate pollution from industrial units while allowing factories that emit less to trade unused permits, combining environmental responsibility with market-driven incentives.

The recognition sends an important message: innovation is not limited to technology, forward-thinking governance can be equally transformative.

MIF’s Earthshot Legacy: Building Climate-Tech leaders

South Asia’s growing presence at Earthshot is not a sudden development. Over the past decade, the Marico Innovation Foundation (MIF) has mentored startups, some of whom are now recognised globally for climate impact. Through its Scale Up programme, MIF provides hands-on mentorship to for-profit start-ups across sectors of plastic waste management, clean technology, and agri-technology.

Three MIF-supported startups have already won Earthshot:

Takachar: In 2021, Takachar won the inaugural Earthshot for the ‘Clean Our Air’ category. By converting crop residue into usable bio-products using a portable, tractor-mounted unit, Takachar tackles India’s crop burning crisis. MIF’s support since 2024 has helped Takachar expand its operations, refine its technology, and build market linkages.

Kheyti: In 2022, MIF-supported Kheyti won the prize under the ‘Protect & Restore Nature’ category. Their Greenhouse-in-a-Box offers small farmers controlled, climate-resilient growing conditions at a fraction of the traditional cost while using 90% less water and dramatically reducing pesticide dependency. MIF’s mentorship enabled faster scale and deeper reach.

S4S Technologies: In 2023, S4S Technologies won the Earthshot prize for the ‘Build a Waste-free World’ category. S4S, which joined Scale-Up in 2019, empowers women farmers with solar-powered food processing solutions, enabling them to preserve surplus produce and earn steady incomes.

“S4S’s innovative solution combines cutting-edge technology with the practical support and training needed to ensure women farmers can thrive and improve their livelihoods for themselves and their families,” says Nidhi Pant, Co-Founder of S4S Technologies.

South Asia’s climate moment is now

The Earthshot Prize 2025 has affirmed what the region already knows: South Asia isn’t just adapting to climate change, it is shaping the global response.

Bangladesh’s community-led resilience model, India’s policy innovation in Gujarat, and the rise of a powerful clean-tech and agri-tech ecosystem all signal a new era where solutions are born at the intersection of technology, policy, and community, and mentorship matters as much as capital.