MUMBAI: India is back on the leaderboard of finalists in the sixth edition of The Earthshot Prize this year, with two organisations, Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) and Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, in the reckoning for the £1 million prize, to be announced in Mumbai next month. The award ceremony, hosted by Karan Johar, is pegged to be the Prize’s biggest yet.Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, shortlisted for the Clean Our Air Earthshot, has been driving India’s electric three-wheeler transition at scale, while MHT, shortlisted for Fix Our Climate, has developed an affordable, women-led approach to heat resilience through cool roofs, community-led Heat Action Plans and climate risk insurance.They join a global cohort that includes Bhutan for its work on forest conservation; Ørsted, the Danish renewable energy company; PFAS-Free France, working to phase out forever chemicals in everyday products; Barcelona for its work on climate adaptation; and Satellites on Fire, an Argentinian AI-powered wildfire detection and alert platform.The Earthshot Prize is one of the most prestigious global environmental awards, founded by Prince William in 2020. It awards a prize of £1 million each to five winners, from a list of 15 finalists, for pioneering solutions across nature, air, oceans, waste and climate. This year’s finalists were selected from nearly 7,000 nominations across 169 countries.“I’m proud to welcome these 15 Finalists to the Earthshot Prize community and look forward to celebrating their stories in Mumbai this November,” said Prince William in a press note. “Seeing solutions work gives us all confidence to act. When they succeed, they inspire others and accelerate change.”Accelerated change is, in fact, one of the yardsticks of the prize this year, as the science of positive tipping points has been applied for the first time to its selection criteria. Based on a framework that draws on the research of Professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter, positive tipping points accelerate decarbonisation through affordable, scalable solutions. The framework maps 51 solution areas—reduced costs, ecosystem recovery, policy change—that can accelerate adoption.“Mahindra Last Mile Mobility is a great example of positive tipping points in action,” says Jason Knauf, CEO of The Earthshot Prize. Their business model for electric rickshaws includes not just the vehicle itself, but charging infrastructure, financing and battery recycling. “They’ve now crossed the tipping point within India, selling more electric rickshaws than traditional ones. This matters because we know that the highest concentrations of PM 2.5 pollution, the most pernicious form of air pollution, are being concentrated from vehicle transport in dense urban areas for last-mile for delivery and drop-offs,” Knauf adds.Suman Mishra, MD and CEO of Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, says that with 400,000 vehicles on the road, they’ve proved that sustainability and scalability can coexist. The Earthshot nomination, she believes, will help leverage their position in states where the uptake of e-rickshaws has been slow and build inroads into international markets—propelling them toward their goal of deploying one million electric vehicles by 2031. “The nomination also gives us the currency to participate in policy discussions around air quality,” Mishra says.The prize comes with a substantial purse, but all finalists receive mentorship, resources, technical support and access to a global network of businesses, investors, philanthropists and environmental experts designed to help solutions scale.And scale is exactly what MHT considers the nomination’s biggest reward. “The confluence of urban development, urban poverty, women and climate change still needs a lot more work,” says Bijal Brahmbhatt, Executive Director, MHT. “We want to use the Earthshot network to be able to scale our work across India and also support other smaller developmental actors to come into this space.”The organisation credits its success to a systemic approach that brings local governments, markets, academics and technical solution providers together to create solutions the community can easily adopt. Affordable heat insurance for informal women workers is one of these pioneering products. “The government of Maharashtra, inspired by the programme, has piloted an insurance model for the National Urban Livelihood Mission groups for heat and rain,” says Brahmbhatt. “And the Oriental Insurance Company has now floated heat insurance for Delhi.”These are the kind of positive tipping point solutions that The Earthshot Prize is celebrating this year. “We are trying to show that environmental progress is something that we need to celebrate the same way that we celebrate the Oscars and the Grammys,” says Knauf. “And there’s no better place to do that than in Mumbai, which is a global capital of culture, sport, finance and entertainment.”
