The Financial Times Climate Change Challenge

The hottest thinking on climate change
By Ed Crooks
November 12 2008

The Financial Times is launching a competition to find the world’s most creative ideas for tackling the threat of climate change.

The FT Climate Change Challenge, backed by Hewlett-Packard, the information technology company, and Forum for the Future, the sustainable development group, aims to highlight businesses and other organisations with ground-breaking approaches to what is arguably the greatest long-term danger we face.

The objective of the competition is to harness the collective brainpower of FT readers to identify ideas that have the potential to be scaled up to a significant size, both to build a successful business and to have a material impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

From those suggestions, a short-list of five will be chosen by a judging panel including Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, Sir Richard Branson, Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Mark Hurd, chairman and chief executive of HP.

The short-listed ideas will then be presented in the FT newspaper and online in March 2009, and readers will have a chance to vote for their favourite. The winner in the vote will receive a $75,000 prize, sponsored by HP, to help develop their product and bring it to market.

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, says:
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“We have to innovate our way out of the climate crisis, and that means unleashing a wave of creativity not seen since the Industrial Revolution. By showcasing some of the world’s most exciting innovations, we want to show there are solutions to climate change, and money to be made from finding those solutions.”
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More details about the competition, including how to enter, related articles and terms and conditions, can be found at http://www.ft.com/indepth/climatechallenge
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