Royals Will and Kate Announce 2022 Earthshot Prize Winners at Star-Studded Event (Updates)

Royals fans in Massachusetts were excited to welcome William and Kate, Prince and Princess of Wales to Boston, where they recently visited to announce the 2022 Earthshot Prize winners.

Who are the winners of the royal couple’s environmental prize this year? And who has won the award, which comes with a £1 million (about $1.2 million USD) reward, in past years? Keep reading for a look into this year’s ceremony, the 2022 finalists and winners, and last year's winners.

Prince William and David Attenborough first unveiled the Earthshot Prize in 2020; in 2021, William presented the first five Earthshot Prize winners with their awards, which honor those creating solutions “that will repair our planet this decade.”

Every year until 2030, William will present five winners with the Earthshot Prize, and an accompanying £1 million.

The 2022 Earthshot Prize awards ceremony took place in Boston, Mass., where Will and Kate arrived on Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022. The visit marked their first time in the U.S. since 2014, as reported by CBS News.

According to the news outlet, the royal couple centered their three-day Massachusetts trip on environmental work; they met with organizers responding to local rising sea levels at Greentown Labs; they also visited Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child; and of course, they attended the Earthshot Prize awards ceremony on Friday, Dec. 2.

The Earthshot Prize awards ceremony featured musical performances from Billie Eilish, Finneas, Chloe x Halle, Annie Lennox, and Ellie Goulding. Actors Rami Malek, Catherine O'Hara, and Shailene Woodley presented prizes, as did Princess Kate. And Prince William delivered the closing remarks, as reported by People.

The 15 finalists for the 2022 award were listed on the Earthshot website ahead of the event, but the five 2022 winners were not revealed until the Dec. 2 ceremony.

The five winners were:

• Kheyti’s greenhouse-in-a-box in India
• Mukuru Clean Stoves, a company making stoves that burn cleaner and produce less harmful pollution than traditional stoves in Kenya
• Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia
• Notpla, a plastic alternative made from seaweed and other plants, from the U.K.
• 44.01, an environmental organization from Oman,

The other 10 finalists were:

• Ampd Enertainer, an electric battery storage system from Hong Kong, China
• The City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands for its circular economy efforts
• Desert Agricultural Transformation, a process turning barren desert into farmable land in China
• Fleather, a sustainable leather alternative made from used flowers in the Ganges in India
• Hutan, a research organization in Malaysia
• LanzaTech, a company using bacteria to recycle carbon pollution in the U.S.
• Low Carbon Materials, a company making construction greener in the U.K.
• Roam, a company making electric vehicles in Africa, for Africa
• SeaForester, an organization using “seaforestation” techniques to restore seaweed forests in Portugal
• The Great Bubble Barrier, a unique solution to plastic pollution in rivers and oceans, in the Netherlands

In 2021, the five Earthshot Prize winners were:

• Costa Rica, for the country’s reforestation efforts over the past 30 years
• Takachar, a machine that can be attached to farm tractors to transform agricultural and forest waste into bio-based fuel and fertilizer, in India
• Coral Vita, a company that takes coral it grows on land and then plants it in oceans, from the Bahamas
• Food Waste Hubs, which help donate surplus food from food businesses to people need in Milan, Italy
• Enapter’s AEM Electrolyser technology, which transforms renewable electricity into hydrogen gas that has zero emissions, from Thailand, Germany, and Italy.

Find out how to watch the award ceremony here.

UPDATE, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2:47 p.m. ET: This article, originally published on Dec. 1, 2022, has been updated to reflect the winners of the 2022 Earthshot Prize.