Call for Nominations: Equator Prize 2025 (up to $10,000) – YOA

Deadline: February 23, 2025

Nominations are open for the Equator Prize 2025. The Equator Prize 2025 will likely be awarded to excellent Indigenous Peoples and area people-led initiatives that advance revolutionary nature-primarily based options for sustainable growth, in alignment with the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Equator Prize 2025 Theme:  Nature for Climate Action

This 12 months’s Equator Prize will acknowledge revolutionary initiatives that showcase how motion on nature, led by Indigenous Peoples and native communities, can present efficient local weather options, and reveal efficient pathways to rework our world techniques for individuals and Planet. Winning initiatives will likely be honored for their successes in defending, restoring, and/or sustainably managing nature for nature-constructive growth outcomes.

Thematic Areas

Thematic priorities embrace:

• Nature for Climate Mitigation, Adaptation and Resilience. Actions to defend, preserve, and restore forests, mangroves, peatlands, soils, oceans, and marine ecosystems, in addition to actions to construct local weather-resilient meals techniques and develop regenerative agriculture and forestry practices to adapt to local weather change. These embrace actions to:
  • Maintain intact ecosystems as they sequester higher; forests, mangroves, peatlands, and soils are the best pure carbon shops;
  • Uphold Indigenous Peoples’ land tenure, governance, rights, and Traditional data, as they’re important to defend forests and key ecosystems;
  • Achieve forest safety by participatory monitoring and enormous-scale mapping and spatial planning efforts;
  • Recognize and permit Indigenous land defenders and native youth activists to lead initiatives for local weather mitigation, justice, and construct neighborhood resilience to adapt to local weather change;
  • Tackle water safety, which is vital for life, by defending and restoring ecosystems vital to water sources in any respect ranges, together with continental;
  • Transform our meals techniques to be extra local weather-resilient, much less carbon-intensive, and adaptable to local weather change; and
  • Promote nature-primarily based options to scale back the impacts of pure disasters, resembling floods and droughts, by restoring and defending key ecosystems.
• Nature for a Just Transition. Actions to inexperienced the financial system in a means that’s as honest and inclusive as doable for all members of society, together with Indigenous Peoples and native communities, whereas creating respectable work alternatives and leaving nobody behind. These efforts reveal how options led on the native-degree can contribute to a worldwide worth shift, together with an financial and monetary shift. Harnessing round financial system and reusing supplies to scale back the necessity for useful resource extraction and reduce stress on wildlife and threats to biodiversity. Shaping a nature-constructive future by rethinking enterprise as common as an OPPORTUNITY to sustainably handle and regenerate nature and catalyze low-carbon economies. These embrace actions to:
  • Show that Indigenous Peoples and native communities can create and lead profitable enterprises and bioeconomy fashions;
  • Prove that efficient native inexperienced options can scale back inequalities, enhance livelihoods, improve accountable manufacturing and consumption, and create inclusive, resilient, and low-carbon economies, whereas additionally bringing well being advantages;
  • Demonstrate that micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and Indigenous-led economies present viable options to local weather and alternatives for nature regeneration and financial transformation;
  • Initiate new fashions of local weather finance and funding mechanisms will be put in place to fund resilience, adaptation, and local weather motion; and
  • Respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights as important to constructing a brand new sustainable and thriving financial system.

Special consideration will likely be given to nominees championing youth and ladies-led local weather motion.

• Local nature-primarily based options for sustainable growth
  • The Equator Prize 2025 nomination course of gives neighborhood-primarily based initiatives the chance to function their work on the Equator Initiative’s Nature-Based Solutions Database, an internet portal devoted to native nature-primarily based options for sustainable growth. This platform connects communities around the globe and shares native options that profit each individuals and the Planet. Participation on this platform is optionally available when submitting nominations for the Equator Prize.

Prize

• Each Equator Prize winner will obtain USD $10,000 and will likely be supported to take part in a sequence of coverage dialogues and particular occasions within the fall of 2025.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the Equator Prize 2025:

• The initiative should have been in existence for no less than three years, and/or its actions should have been carried out for no less than three years.
• The nominee have to be both:
  • A area people-primarily based initiative working in a rural space inside a rustic receiving help from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
  • Or, an initiative led by Indigenous Peoples in any nation, working in a rural space.
• The nominee’s actions have to be nature-primarily based and ship advantages that contribute to no less than two Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Selection Criteria

Winners of the Equator Prize 2025 will likely be chosen by an unbiased Technical Advisory Committee, which is able to consider nominations primarily based on the next standards:

• Impact: The extent to which the nominated initiative has achieved measurable and constructive environmental, social, and financial impacts that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs);
• Innovation: The extent to which the nominated initiative demonstrates new approaches and fashions that overcome prevailing constraints, and will provide basically new approaches to adapting to and/or mitigating local weather change, whereas advancing native sustainable growth;
• Scalability and/or replicability: The extent to which the nominated initiative might be scaled up sub-nationally or nationally, and/or be replicated inside the nation and past;
• Resilience and Adaptability: The extent to which the nominated initiative demonstrates adaptability to environmental, social, and financial adjustments, and/or resilience within the face of exterior pressures;
• Reduced inequalities: The extent to which the initiative reduces inequalities in revenue in addition to these associated to age, intercourse, incapacity, race, ethnicity, origin, faith, financial or different standing, with a selected deal with benefiting ;
• Social Inclusion: The extent to which the nominated initiative consists of youth, Elders, Indigenous Peoples, and different numerous teams within the resolution-making processes and the actions that have an effect on them;
• Gender Equality: The extent to which the nominated initiative is led by ladies or ensures the equality and empowerment of ladies and ladies.

Nomination

• Nominations could also be submitted in English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish. To nominate in different languages (resembling Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Russian or others), contact the Equator Initiative for directions at [email protected].
• Nominations have to be submitted by 23 February 2025.

Click here to nominate

For extra info, go to Equator Prize.