Prince William Calls For Urgent Action To Repair The Planet As Earthshot Finalists Revealed

Prince William has warned that global efforts to tackle environmental damage are not moving fast enough, calling on businesses, investors and leaders to act with greater urgency as the latest Earthshot Prize finalists are unveiled.

The Prince of Wales said the challenge was no longer simply finding environmental solutions, but getting proven ideas backed, funded and deployed at a much larger scale.

Speaking to the BBC as the 2026 Earthshot Prize finalists were announced, William said: “We’re not moving fast enough.” He added that more businesses, investors and leaders needed to support solutions that are already demonstrating results and help expand their reach.

His intervention places the Prince William planet repair urgency message firmly at the centre of this year’s Earthshot campaign, six years after he founded the environmental prize.

The comments also follow a summer in which William has repeatedly pointed to extreme heat and wildfires as evidence of the need to accelerate environmental action.

Writing earlier in September, the prince argued that slow, incremental progress would be insufficient and called instead for what he describes as “urgent optimism” combining confidence that workable solutions exist with recognition that the window for scaling them is limited.

Prince William Says Environmental Solutions Need to Scale Faster

The latest warning came alongside the announcement of 15 finalists for the 2026 Earthshot Prize, selected from almost 7,000 nominations spanning 169 countries.

The finalists cover the five Earthshot goals established by William: protecting and restoring nature, cleaning the air, reviving oceans, creating a waste-free world and fixing the climate.

Five winners will ultimately receive £1 million each, alongside technical support, mentoring and access to investors and organisations capable of helping their projects expand.

The winners are due to be announced at the Earthshot Prize Awards Night in Mumbai on 17 November 2026.

This year’s finalists range from governments and major businesses to Indigenous conservation programmes and technology companies.

They include Satellites on Fire, an Argentina-based system using artificial intelligence to detect and track wildfires across 21 countries, and Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, which Earthshot says has become India’s biggest seller of electric three-wheelers.

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative was selected for its work reconnecting wildlife habitats across the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States.

Other finalists include Bhutan, the Indigenous Desert Alliance in Australia, AirQo, Ørsted, the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance and the City of Barcelona.

Barcelona was recognised for efforts to adapt its heavily used Mediterranean coastline to the growing risks associated with climate change, while Bhutan’s approach combines forest protection with national environmental policy.

William said the finalists showed that environmental progress was already possible.

Rather than presenting climate and nature problems as challenges without solutions, the Earthshot approach increasingly focuses on identifying initiatives that have already worked at one scale and finding ways to make them significantly bigger.

That distinction appears to be central to William’s latest intervention.

His message is aimed particularly at institutions with the capital, purchasing power or political influence required to transform promising environmental projects into mainstream systems.

Scientists Say ‘Positive Tipping Points’ Could Accelerate Change

This year’s Earthshot selection process has also introduced a stronger scientific element.

For the first time, finalists have been assessed using research into “positive tipping points” developed with the University of Exeter.

A positive tipping point occurs when a beneficial technology, policy or behaviour reaches a stage where further adoption begins to reinforce itself.

That could happen when increased use brings prices down, lower prices encourage more customers to adopt a technology, growing demand attracts investment and policymakers subsequently introduce measures that make adoption easier still.

New research from the Earthshot Prize and the University of Exeter identified 51 environmental solution areas where this type of accelerating change may be possible across climate, nature, oceans, waste and air pollution.

Professor Tim Lenton, Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and a leading researcher on tipping points, said environmental recovery requires reaching points where progress can begin reinforcing itself.

He said:

“We need to unlock positive tipping points, where progress builds on itself, costs fall with scale, and recovery becomes self-propelling.”

The research identifies three particularly important conditions for achieving such change: affordability, accessibility and attractiveness.

In practical terms, an environmental alternative often needs to become competitive in price, widely available and sufficiently effective or desirable for large numbers of people and organisations to switch voluntarily.

The concept helps explain why William is concentrating increasingly on scale rather than invention alone.

A promising technology or conservation project may already exist, but its global environmental value remains limited unless investment, infrastructure and policy allow it to spread.

Earthshot Prize chief executive Jason Knauf has similarly argued that the current challenge is turning existing ambition into large-scale action.

The organisation says this year’s finalists have specifically been chosen for their potential to create effects reaching beyond the immediate projects themselves.

Earthshot Reports Growing Impact Since 2020

Earthshot says the 75 finalists supported since the prize began have collectively produced measurable environmental results.

According to figures released alongside the 2026 finalists, projects within the Earthshot community have avoided or captured more than 18 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, while protecting or restoring around 58 million hectares of land.

The organisation also reports that finalists have protected or restored 85 million hectares of ocean and coastline, removed or avoided 465,000 tonnes of waste and saved 21 million tonnes of water.

Its projects have also contributed to improving air quality in areas inhabited by around 600 million people, according to Earthshot’s own impact figures.

Those numbers are being used to support William’s wider argument that practical environmental solutions exist but require stronger backing.

The debate is particularly relevant to London.

In June, the Prince of Wales attended the Earthshot Prize Impact Assembly at London’s Guildhall during London Climate Action Week, where businesses, investors, environmental organisations and policymakers met to discuss ways of expanding existing projects.

William travelled to the event aboard London’s 3,000th electric bus, accompanied by conservationist Robert Irwin and young climate activists Clover Hogan and Pranav Sharma.

The event focused heavily on the financial and commercial mechanisms needed to move environmental technologies beyond pilot programmes.

That same theme now runs through William’s September warning: solutions without large-scale deployment will not deliver change quickly enough.

Why Is Prince William Stressing Urgency Before 2030?

The year 2030 remains central to the Earthshot project.

When William launched the prize in 2020, it was designed around a decade of action, with the stated mission of finding and scaling solutions capable of helping repair the planet by the end of the decade.

The five Earthshot goals deliberately cover interconnected environmental problems rather than concentrating only on carbon emissions.

That means the initiative supports projects involving biodiversity, air pollution, oceans, waste management and climate alongside one another.

Recent University of Exeter research reinforces that interconnected approach.

Dr Steven R Smith, lead author of the positive tipping points research, said progress in one environmental system frequently depends on progress somewhere else.

The implication is that changes such as cheaper clean electricity can potentially support improvements across transport, industry, air quality and other sectors rather than producing benefits in isolation.

William’s latest language therefore reflects both urgency and a shift towards implementation.

The central question is increasingly not whether technologies and environmental projects capable of producing measurable benefits exist.

It is whether governments, investors and companies can deploy them quickly enough and at sufficient scale.

The 2026 Earthshot finalists will now spend the next two months preparing for the Mumbai awards, where five projects will receive the £1 million prizes.

But William’s message ahead of the ceremony is already clear: environmental innovation alone is not enough.

The next stage is turning successful ideas into systems capable of operating across cities, countries and entire industries and doing so before the Earthshot decade reaches its 2030 deadline.