The UK was the first in the world to enter the Industrial Revolution,
a revolution that came about as we learnt how to harness
the immense power of coal, oil and gas.
That access to power transformed the way we could live
and what we were able to achieve.
But it turns out our reliance on fossil fuels was just a phase.
It's taken a bit of time, but there's now no doubt that we
are entering a new revolution, a sustainable revolution.
This field of turbines off the east coast of England has been
turning day and night for ten years,
generating enough electricity to power 160,000 households.
And today, Britain's offshore wind farms
supply the electricity needs of more than a third of its homes.
It's a small step in the right direction.
But across the world, we need to do so much more.
The climate is changing faster than ever,
which is why "fix our climate" is one of the five
goals of the Earthshot Prize.
Every year till 2030,
we will award £1 million to projects that will help us
to achieve this goal.
In this film,
we'll explain the scale of the problem posed by climate change...
..introduce you to some amazing people already
working on extraordinary solutions...
..and finally, I'll introduce you to the three new projects
shortlisted for the Earthshot Prize...
..each of which could play
an important future role in fixing our climate.
Here to tell the story of how we can
fix our climate are Sir David Attenborough and another member
of our Earthshot Prize council, a remarkable woman from Costa Rica who
was behind the success of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change,
Christiana Figueres.
I've been involved in climate change for 30 years.
That sounds like a long time. It IS a long time.
It's half my life, actually!
If you don't believe that climate change is happening,
walk out your door!
And you will notice that there are changes in the cycles
of nature that are just not normal.
They have occurred in the past few years,
they're occurring more frequently.
You see birds migrating at different times,
you see butterflies migrating at different times.
So when you see nature trying desperately to adapt,
you know that something is going on.
I describe myself as a stubborn optimist,
and my invitation is for everyone to become a stubborn optimist,
to be informed of the challenges that we're facing and, because
of that, to garner everything that we can to create a different future.
Because we are at the point of human evolution -
we have the technologies, we have the finance,
we know what policies we have to enact.
We know what we have to do,
because we know what lies at the heart of this immense problem.
Greenhouse gases, mostly those containing carbon,
trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere.
We need some carbon in the atmosphere to keep us warm,
but too much and the global temperature goes up.
Over the last two centuries, we've been converting
huge quantities of carbon in the ground into gas.
According to an IPCC report, the level of carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere has not been this high in the last two million years.
Our world is heating up.
So, what causes carbon to become a gas in the atmosphere?
How do our modern lives affect the climate?
And how is climate change being felt by the people
living on the front line?
My family farm is near Broken Hill,
in the heart of the Australian outback.
We have been in drought for most of the past two decades.
Climate change means less rain and more extreme heat.
We raise a hardy breed of sheep,
but even for them the land's becoming too hot and too dry.
In these conditions, even the native wildlife
is struggling to survive.
No matter what my family and I do on our farm,
the climate challenge is bigger than us. We can't adapt quick enough.
Our farm has gone from 1,000 sheep to just 12.
Farmers are not only victims of climate change,
we are also part of the problem.
One of the problems we're all involved in is the way
we produce our food.
It creates over a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Some are well known,
like the clearing of wild habitat for farmland...
..and the carbon-rich methane emissions of our livestock.
One of the least talked-about impacts of farming is on our soils.
Healthy soils, full of life,
are one of the greatest carbon stores on Earth.
But overgrazing and intensive farming kills the life in the soil,
and it turns into dust.
The carbon is lost into the air.
24 billion tonnes of soil disappears every year,
and the loose soil adds to seasonal dust storms.
When I get a phone call that the dust storm is coming,
I will run outside and look towards Broken Hill,
and you'll see this sort of orange tinge on the horizon,
sort of stretching from one side to the other.
You run around the house and you shut all the windows and the doors.
You then just have to sit it out, and the sky progressively turns
from a light orange to a darker orange to a red to a burgundy.
And in the really severe storms, I mean,
you can't see your hand a metre away in front of you.
If you go outside, the sand just, like, stings.
Having done my own education, understanding what climate change is
and how it's causing this pain in the landscape,
I can walk out into the paddock and see this illness,
and I can walk down to the creek bed
and see these 500-year-old river red gums shedding their leaves.
These trees that are many hundreds of years old
and which are now dying are saying that something is different
than it has been for many hundreds of years.
They are literally screaming in our faces that something is wrong.
We need to observe what's actually occurring and do something about it.
Tackling emissions of farming is essential.
But by far our biggest problem - and the source of over 80%
of our carbon dioxide emissions - is our reliance on fossil fuels.
Coal, oil and natural gas are formed from the bodies of fossilised
plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.
We have taken this ancient carbon, some locked away since before the
dinosaurs walked the Earth, and cast it into the atmosphere of today.
These fuels have transformed our lives.
They power our modern cities,
our manufacturing and our transport.
They've fuelled much of our development and allowed us
to make connections with people across the world.
But the world we have created with these powerful fuels is now
under serious threat from the carbon pollution they release.
One example of this conflict
is on the low-lying islands of the Maldives.
I grew up very close to the ocean, and I have been swimming for
a long time and I've been diving for a long time, almost 30, 35 years.
So I am very close to the reef and the ocean.
The temperature right now is about 31 degrees Celsius,
and we're already seeing the coral is very stressed.
If the temperature hikes up to 34, 35,
there will be bleaching that will kill all the young corals.
The astonishing colours of corals come from algae
living inside their bodies.
When stressed, the corals expel their algae
and the reef turns a ghostly white.
Bleached coral reefs are less able to withstand storms
and may die with time.
One of the biggest causes of this bleaching is heat.
Seeing a reef top that is full of life and then seeing it
bleach twice in my diving career... And it was really sad,
it was like the whole reef was covered in snow.
You know, it's never going to come back quickly.
It's, again, going to struggle for another ten years to recover.
And that hit me very badly.
The ocean surface is almost one degree warmer than a hundred years
ago, and coral reefs from Hawaii to Australia are suffering in the heat.
If the corals die, we will lose the fish that live
and breed on the reef, affecting the lives of the 500 million
people who depend on reefs for food.
The people of the Maldives rely on fossil fuels to power the boats that
deliver their fresh water, food and materials and the planes that
bring the tourists, who generate a quarter of the country's income.
Yet those same fossil fuels are threatening the tropical
paradise they call home.
They, like all of us, are currently trapped in a conflict,
tied in to burning fuels that are causing such destruction.
For the Maldives, a warming world threatens
far more than just their reefs.
Most of the islands are less than one metre above the waves.
Any rise in sea level, changes in the ocean currents
and increase in storms impacts the coastline.
This island used to be in the middle of this lagoon,
and this tree was almost in the middle of the island.
There are two trees like this, this one
and the one that's standing there.
So it's completely eroded.
This will probably go in another five years, no?
Yeah, maybe five. Yeah.
That house was not on the beach, it was in the middle of the island.
The island has eroded so badly
that it has, you know, taken everything.
A lot of the climate change that is happening is beyond our control.
We are the first people to feel it, and we are the most vulnerable.
It's a beautiful country, you know?
You come here and you see this amazing ocean.
But the ocean is the biggest threat to us,
the very ocean that we are proud of.
We need to get cleaner fuel and we need to fight stronger,
because it is happening in front of us.
Soon, all of us are likely to be affected by the increasing heat.
The average global temperature is steadily rising,
and the last seven years are the hottest since records began.
In the Arctic, the temperature is rising
twice as fast as the global average.
The falling of the ice makes the Arctic less white,
which means that it is less able to reflect the sun's rays to keep cool.
And on land, the frozen earth of the Arctic -
the permafrost - is also starting to fall.
As it warms, the ground is literally changing beneath our feet.
In Alaska, the people living closest to the land
are witness to the greatest changes.
My name is Ruth Miller, and my Dena'ina Athabascan name
is Lchavaya K'isen, which means "whirlwind woman".
Alaska has always been home, for tens of thousands of years,
to a huge diversity of indigenous peoples.
Across Alaska, across the state, a huge number of our villages are
noticing extraordinary changes that our grandparents don't recognise.
The impacts of melting permafrost are multifold.
We see it unsettling our road systems and our infrastructure, and
houses are losing their foundations and sinking into the ground.
Ruth collates the stories of rapid change from across the state
and campaigns for greater climate justice.
One effect of the warming ground
is the formation of new lakes in the forest.
And it is in these lakes that we see how the permafrost thaw
threatens the entire global climate.
These lakes are a source of the carbon-rich gas methane,
which scientists detect by its power to explode.
The frozen ground contains carbon from thousands of years ago.
As the Earth warms, it's like opening a freezer door.
Microbes start to feed on the carbon and generate methane.
This greenhouse gas is over 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Oh, whoa...
The more that the Arctic melts, the more methane is released.
And the more methane that is released, the more the globe warms.
The melting permafrost is a ticking time bomb.
It will exacerbate every other kind of climate threat
that we are already dealing with today.
I worry that I won't get the chance to teach my children how to
bead with porcupine quills or make fish-head soup or tan caribou hides.
I worry that they won't know the Alaska that I grew up knowing,
because I have already been removed from the Alaska
that my grandparents knew.
We have no future within the status quo,
so it is not a mere interest to advocate for the environment.
It's not even a passion.
It's a responsibility. It's a demand.
And we have no other option but to take stewardship of our futures.
The permafrost of the Arctic contains
up to 1,600 billion metric tonnes of carbon,
about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere.
The only way to ensure much of this remains locked away
in the frozen earth is to prevent our world from becoming too hot.
Despite knowing the science, we have yet to act fast enough.
And maybe that's not so surprising.
Maybe we would always wait
until we could see the impact with our own eyes
before we truly understood what is at threat.
Well, now we can most definitely see them.
We must fix our climate, starting in earnest this decade.
But how do we do so?
The latest scientific report from the IPCC is clear.
We have to bring emissions down
to one half of current global levels by 2030.
It is our last chance to stabilise at a level
to which we humans would be able to adapt.
This is the decisive decade,
and it is the responsibility of every adult person
sitting at any decision table to make sure that we do not
saddle young people with a problem that they did not create.
So "impossible" is NOT
a concept that I can accept about addressing climate change.
It is something that we are going to MAKE possible.
By 2050, carbon emissions have to be at or near zero.
And there is hope. There are solutions.
There are people creating change.
In Ghana in 2013, the government planned to solve an energy crisis
with a coal-powered station costing $1.5 billion.
Coal is the most polluting and unsustainable fossil fuel we have.
Chibeze Ezekiel started a grass-roots campaign for
Ghana to invest in renewable energy instead of coal.
He took on the government's plans, and he won.
Chibeze's team took their argument for renewable energy rather
than coal power from the local to the national level.
And their message was heard by the government.
Since the success of his campaign, Ghana has not invested in any coal,
but rather in more renewable sources of energy.
There's enough solar power in Ghana to fuel the entire country.
And one great advantage of solar is you can harness it anywhere.
The village of Nyamebekyere is too remote to connect
to the main power lines.
But a solar-powered microgrid at the heart of the village
brings electricity into homes for the very first time.
Many roads are now lit with solar lights.
By 2030, the aim is to generate 30 times as much renewable power.
Chibeze continues to build momentum for change.
What do we want? Solar energy! And when do we want it?
Now, now! When do we want it? Now, now!
You go, you go! We go! You go, you go! We go!
Young people have a voice now that they have never had before,
and they are exercising it in a very powerful way.
We have to move every economy that currently depends on coal
on to all of the other alternatives that we have developed.
And young people know that.
Renewable power generated
nearly a third of the world's electricity in 2021.
Yet governments are still directly subsidising the fossil fuel industry
with over $500 billion every year,
and new coal-powered stations are still planned.
The amount of carbon dioxide we release is still rising.
Just as renewable energy keeps carbon in the ground, there are
powerful ways to produce our food that lock carbon away in the soil.
You know, if I look back on my mistake-ridden farming career
over nearly 50 years now, halfway through that journey
I probably would have said to a grandson, "Go off and get educated.
"Don't go near the land."
Now I would say, "It's one of the most exciting places to be."
When the early white settlers came, from about 1850 to the turn
of the century, they destroyed vast areas of our grassy woodland.
The sheep then overgrazed the native pastures
and ate out all the diversity.
I wasn't worried in my early career
if I'd overgrazed the landscape and we had bare ground.
I thought our landscape and our pastures
and our whole ecosystems were this resilient resource that you
could really belt around and it would bounce back.
I've learnt the hard way that is not the case.
The terrible drought of the 1980s
sent Massy's farm spiralling into debt.
But the turning point in his life
was when he realised the destructive impact HE was having on the land.
I don't like to think I'm old, but I'm classed as being a bit of
a fossil with grey hair!
Until I started to get into regenerative agriculture,
I thought our indigenous nations had nothing to contribute,
that it was some sort of Stone Age culture.
I mean, you know, I'm ashamed.
I've been privileged to get to know a senior local lawman
from the Ngarigo people called Rod Mason. And...
..we had a kurrajong tree in our front garden, which,
when Rod Mason saw it, he got very emotional,
and he pointed out where the old women from
this probably 400- or 500-year-old tree, the old
Aboriginal women had stripped bark for fibre, etc.
And I hadn't even noticed that.
And so that was the beginning of a huge journey that's shifted my mind,
that we have a lot to learn.
Well, it's a birthright thing,
so the day you're born as an Aboriginal person,
you're given a cultural obligation,
and that's to make country, to look after.
Y'know, we're talking about a people that have been here
over 60,000 years. They do know how to survive and manage it.
Massy discovered regenerative agriculture,
which increases both carbon in the soil and agricultural productivity.
The grazing management practice that we have -
and all regenerative graziers, really, across the world - was
based on an ecologist's work, a guy called Allan Savory in Zimbabwe,
who watched the large migratory herds and he asked the question,
"How come you can have millions of animals
"and yet they're the healthiest grasslands you'll ever see?"
He worked out that high animal density, dung and urine,
a bit of trampling, constant movement... So the animals only ever
grazed there a day or two
because the big-cat predators were driving them.
And they didn't come back for a long period.
From that simple observation,
the modern system of regenerative grazing has evolved.
If I look back at my mismanagement 30, 40 years ago,
some sheep in a 700-acre paddock stayed there most of the year.
And the valuable grasses were constantly eaten out,
and you end up with a simplified ecosystem and compacted ground.
Today, they're rarely in a paddock more than two days,
and they mightn't come back for three or four months.
Nature's had billions of years to get things right.
If we mimic her example, it invariably works,
and that's what the case is with regenerative farming.
The really key thing in this different type of farming
is if you increase your ground cover and your grassland, you're putting
a lot more carbon into the soil, and that really rich treasure, which
we've totally ignored in industrial farming, is the soil biology.
Now if we go out into our paddock and we put a shovel in it,
you've got a much deeper soil, richer colour, a lot of worms,
insects, that sort of thing.
The soils get deeper, you're absorbing more water,
so you're not running into droughts sooner.
We've planted well over 60,000 diverse native species to get
landscape function back into a working landscape.
We've had two new species of wallabies come in.
You know, we're up to about 150 different bird species here now.
The whole thing is just cranking up in health.
It's a really exciting story, and my grandson, Hamish,
who's only 14, is right across it already.
To him, it just seems quite natural,
that what we're doing makes a lot of sense.
So I think the more I stay involved in regenerative agriculture,
when I think about the different approach of our indigenous people
to country, it's definitely not an exploitative approach.
It's leaving the country in a better place when you've left here.
Farmers have abandoned almost 400 billion hectares of land
due to poor soils.
Regenerative agriculture could help restore this land to health,
while locking away an estimated 20 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
It's certainly not the only solution.
We will need to cut down on our most carbon-intensive foods and
embrace pioneering new technologies that sound like science fiction...
..like electric robots that reduce the need for chemicals
by monitoring crops
and killing weeds using electric shocks.
We're on the cusp of a renewably-powered revolution.
We have electric cars, buses
and electric bikes.
If we demand carbon-free transportation,
carbon-free food, carbon-free energy, corporations will
take note and will produce carbon-free products and services.
Yet stopping our carbon emissions is only part of the solution.
No matter how much we reduce our emissions,
we will not be able to address climate change without
physically drawing CO2 out of the air and storing it someplace.
We need to pull five to ten billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide
out of the air each year over the next few decades.
And there are some surprising ways to do it.
My name's Dale Vince and I do a bunch of different things,
all related to sustainability.
We have to find a way to bring large amounts of carbon back
out of the atmosphere, that we put there, and lock it up somehow.
One solution is to pull in air, remove the carbon dioxide
and pump that deep underground.
Capturing carbon this way can be expensive, and Dale's solution
is to turn the carbon in the air into something very valuable.
I was struck by the simple concept that the most enduring
form of carbon that we know about is the diamond,
and wouldn't it be amazing to be able to take carbon
out of the atmosphere and just lock it up permanently,
but into something also that's great fun?
We have what we call our sky mining works,
and this is where we pull the gases we need from the atmosphere.
The carbon captured from the air is fed into a diamond oven,
a sealed chamber containing a diamond seed.
Under very high temperatures, carbon gas bonds to the seed
and forms a diamond.
This whole process is fuelled by solar and wind power.
What we've found in the process is the carbon footprint of what we
avoid - the diamond mining of the Earth - is enormous.
It's three days' worth of renewable energy to make a single carat of
stone that avoids a half a ton of greenhouse gas emissions
if you dug that out of the ground.
And so it represents a way for us to have the bling that we like, you
know, to live this fun lifestyle, but actually without the impact.
We like to call it bling without the sting,
because we miss the environment impact,
the social impact as well as the climate impact.
This is where we need to be in our industrial processes now.
We need to be cleaning up the atmosphere, the land,
the water, in the process of making whatever it is that we're making.
We've got to reverse the tide of the last 100 years
as we make things.
We will need many technological solutions.
Yet the most powerful way to lock away carbon
already happens in nature.
As plants grow, they absorb carbon dioxide
and turn it into food for their cells.
Our wild spaces are natural carbon sinks.
And one area with a huge impact on our climate
is the ocean.
Every time that I go to the ocean, it's the same feeling.
I feel connected with the oceans.
And each day is like a lottery.
Professor Hiram Rosales studies the marine life off the Mexican coast.
For many years, he's observed the annual arrival of the grey whales.
They make the migration along the coastal line,
about 6,000km from Bering Sea in Alaska
to breeding lagoons in Mexico. It's a long, long trip.
And these whales have a powerful impact on our climate.
They dive deep to feed
and come to the surface to breathe and to excrete.
Their waste is the perfect fertiliser for some
of the fastest-growing plants on Earth - phytoplankton.
These microscopic organisms have a mighty impact.
They absorb 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
This vital stirring of ocean nutrients is called the whale pump.
But it only happens if there are whales.
These gentle giants were almost killed off by hunting.
But since it was banned in 1986, they have made an amazing recovery.
The grey whales, well, at least to me,
is one of the high hopes that we have. And I say this because
the grey whales were very close to extinction.
But now, three years ago,
we calculate around 25,000 animals.
If we have more whales, we have more nutrients.
And if we have more nutrients, we have more plankton.
And if we have more plankton, we have more productivity,
we have more capacity to remove the carbon of our atmosphere.
So the importance of the whales is enormous.
We will not address climate change unless we restore our natural
environment and our ecosystems the resilience that they used to
have, that we have robbed from them.
We tend to take nature for granted
and forget that our very survival depends on nature.
Every drop of water, every breath of air
and every morsel of food that we eat comes from nature.
So we do not survive for very long without nature.
Hence, in order to protect our very survival,
we have to be nature-focused.
Restoring and protecting our forests in particular
is essential for all our futures.
Mangroves flourish in wetlands along tropical coasts.
They stand tall in soft mud on a dense network of roots.
And it is these roots that make mangrove forests
the top carbon-capture forests of all.
They trap sediment and dead leaves,
building up huge stores of carbon in the soil,
up to four times as much as rainforests.
But mangroves are frequently destroyed,
the wetlands drained or turned into shrimp farms.
El Salvador had lost 60% of their mangroves since the 1950s.
The community turned the tide on the destruction, replanting and
restoring water flow to the wetlands so the mangroves could regenerate.
The mangroves have another huge benefit for the local villagers.
The network of roots reduces the power of incoming waves
and protects the villages from damage in powerful storms.
The community has successfully restored
over 400 hectares back into thriving forest.
Reforestation projects are happening across the globe.
In my own country of Costa Rica, we put a price on carbon
and paid landowners to replant and protect forests.
In just a few decades, forest cover has risen
from 29% to 52% of our land.
It is something we're very proud of.
We have this incredible opportunity,
the opportunity to be able to look back in 2030 and say,
"The decade of the '20s was the decade in which humanity woke up,
"stood up, and was able to address the greatest challenge
"that we had ever faced."
That is the future that I want,
and that is the future that I invite you to.
We CAN choose to create a world without fossil fuels...
..where we have transport systems powered by clean energy...
..where our food production is carbon neutral.
We can choose to regenerate the wilderness we have lost...
..and protect the wild spaces we have today.
There's no doubt that one or two generations from now,
this planet is going to look VERY different.
The question is, different in which direction?
Is it going to be different
because it is much worse than what we have now?
Or is it going to be different because it's much better?
People everywhere are recognising
the threat climate change poses to our future.
But our transition to zero carbon must ramp up year on year
if we are to meet our global targets.
The Earthshot Prize is here to recognise, reward and support
those with the best solutions to get us there.
It's my honour to introduce you to the three finalists
of the first ever Earthshot Prize to fix our climate.
Our first finalist is SOLbazaar, an initiative that enables people
in isolated rural areas to buy and sell home-generated solar power.
Over four million homes in Bangladesh have solar panels.
With so much sun,
homes often produce more energy than they can use.
And there are still millions of homes that can't afford
solar panels at all.
SOLbazaar has helped both groups by linking everyone up in microgrids.
What we do is we interconnect different households
with our smart meter, which we call the SOLbox,
so that customers can buy and sell electricity.
Like smart meters, the SOLbox works by tracking energy usage and costs.
Customers can use it alongside a mobile app
to trade energy with each other in tiny, affordable amounts.
What this means is if you're not using the electricity
that's being generated in your home, you can just sell it
to your neighbours and earn an income in the process.
Bringing clean energy to all fights climate change
and opens up new opportunities for the communities.
A technology like ours
means they are now able to start businesses that were not feasible
before or even do activities that was not feasible before.
Each home can connect up to three of its neighbours.
The more households that join in, the stronger the microgrid becomes
as the shared pool of energy builds.
If enough villages are linked together, their combined
energy could even be connected and sold to the national grid,
making solar power a significant renewable energy
source for the country.
In nations with poor energy infrastructure, microgrids could
prove game-changing in bringing reliable energy to communities.
This is a Bangladeshi technology that will now go across borders.
I think that is something that I'm really, really excited about.
With extra support, SOLbazaar would work on finding ways for more
people and businesses to tap in to the microgrids.
Our next finalist is the team behind AEM Electrolyser,
a unique small-scale device
that makes the carbon-emission-free fuel, hydrogen.
The AEM Electrolyser is an electrochemical device.
- It works by splitting water, H2 into its constituents,
hydrogen and oxygen gas.
This hydrogen is the green fuel of the future.
Hydrogen can be stored in liquid or gas form,
making it a viable alternative wherever we use fossil fuels,
such as for transport or to heat your home.
It emits no carbon dioxide and, gram for gram,
has three times the energy content of jet fuel.
Most electrolysers around the world today are large industrial projects
taking many years and a lot of engineering time
in order to be realised. Our electrolysers are standardised
and are very compact. A compact product is important
because it allows the unit to be mass-produced.
The electrolysers are also modular, meaning they can be used alone
or combined together to generate large amounts of hydrogen.
If you were to use just one electrolyser, well,
that would be enough, actually, to make your home energy-independent.
But if we think in scale, you can stack our electrolysers according to
your hydrogen requirements. AEM Electrolysers have already been
used in a refuelling station for hydrogen cars...
..and even planes.
If powered by renewable energy, the hydrogen produced is carbon neutral.
The team believe their innovation could make green hydrogen
available to all. The profile and platform of the prize would
accelerate their journey to mass production.
Our third climate finalist is clean-energy start-up Reeddi.
Their solar-charged power capsules are a clean-energy alternative
to diesel generators.
Across much of West Africa, power cuts are frequent.
In order to guarantee reliable electricity, many have little choice
but to use small diesel generators, which emit carbon dioxide.
Reeddi's founder, an engineer, was determined to solve the problem.
Olu set to work designing a bespoke solar-charged power system.
Each capsule is much more powerful than regular portable chargers,
powerful enough to run home appliances, machines,
or even a whole house or workshop for a few hours.
They are too expensive for most people to own.
But Olu has a plan for that.
Once returned,
Reeddi recharges the capsules at a local solar-power facility.
Each takes just five hours to be fully charged,
and has a lifetime of five years.
Olu's research suggests that 160kg of carbon dioxide
emissions could be saved each year for every person that
switches from a diesel generator to Reeddi.
Olu's plan is for solar-powered vending machines that dispense,
receive and charge the capsules,
to be installed on streets across West Africa.
Because almost everything we do at the moment has a carbon footprint,
we need as many brilliant solutions as possible to have
a chance of achieving this Earthshot.
One of these three finalists will win the Earthshot Prize and get
the platform and resources they need to scale their ground-breaking work.
Nine more solutions for fixing our climate will receive
the same support over the course of this decade.
With enough will, we CAN work together
and all rise to this immense challenge.
But fixing our climate is just one of five Earthshots
we must achieve in order to repair our planet.
In the next episode, we will discover
the story of our third Earthshot, "clean our air".
We'll visit a power plant so clean you can ski on it...
..learn how street art is filtering the air of Mexico City...
..and discover inspiring people around the world battling to improve
air quality for the benefit of all of us.