William’s Children’s Earthshot: Will the funding make ideas happen?

Fifteen teams of children are due to present environmental ideas in Mumbai, with funding promised for winning entries to develop and put their proposals into practice. That gives the I CAN Earthshot Challenge a more useful test than whether it adds a youthful flourish to a high-profile awards event: what, in the end, will the money help them do?

The Prince of Wales is due to host the Earthshot Prize in Mumbai in November 2026. Alongside the main awards, the selected teams are expected to take part in two days of presentations and workshops. The reports say winning entries will receive 2,000 dollars, or £1,490, towards developing and implementing their ideas. They do not identify the teams, describe their projects or say how many entries will receive the funding. Nor do they give the exact dates of the children’s challenge.

Those gaps matter because the challenge’s promise is practical, not merely ceremonial. An opportunity to present an idea may be encouraging; support to develop and implement it is a more tangible proposition. The stated purpose of the funding is to help winning entries move beyond presentation. That is a worthwhile ambition, particularly when the event could otherwise be judged chiefly by the prestige of the main Earthshot awards and the attention that surrounds them.

But the sum alone cannot tell us whether the challenge will make a difference. The key question is what the support enables: whether it helps young participants refine an idea, test it, or take it into practice. The reports do not provide enough detail to answer that in advance, and it would be premature to claim that the challenge will produce lasting environmental results. Equally, it would be premature to dismiss it for not yet demonstrating them. The fairest judgement is provisional, and tied to what happens after the presentations.

The strongest case for caution is that a funding promise is not the same as evidence of impact. The teams and projects are not yet identified in the available reports, the number of winning entries is unclear, and the children’s two-day programme has no stated exact dates. Without those details, it is difficult to assess the scale of the opportunity or what the money might support. A challenge attached to a prominent international event could attract attention, but attention by itself does not show that an idea has been developed or implemented.

That is a fair warning, but it is not a reason to write off the programme before the winners and their work are known. Even modest funding can help young people develop environmental ideas, and this challenge is explicitly intended to support winning entries in taking their ideas forward. Its practical purpose is a reason to take it seriously, not a guarantee that it will succeed. The distinction matters: scepticism should set a standard for judging the outcome, not rule out the possibility of one.

The main Earthshot Prize awards ceremony is scheduled for 27 November in Mumbai. That date should not be confused with the children’s challenge: the reports place the two-day programme in November but do not specify when it will take place. Nor should the challenge be treated as simply another part of the awards ceremony. Its presentations and workshops are a separate strand, with a different measure of value: whether selected young people receive useful support to develop and implement their ideas.

The next useful information will be concrete: which teams were selected, what they propose, how many entries receive funding, and what that funding allows them to do. Those details would make it possible to judge the scale of the commitment and, later, its results. Until then, the I CAN Earthshot Challenge deserves neither a victory lap nor a sneer. It has a practical promise, and that promise should be judged by the action it enables, not by the glamour of the event beside which it is staged.