Climate Curve to celebrate award winners on Wednesday

Fans of  “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and the environment can satiate both tastes on Wednesday. The comedian will be taking the stage for an event with local nonprofit Climate Curve’s annual awards ceremony. 

The 6 p.m. event at the Paul JAS Center in Aspen will be celebrating the organization’s 10 Keeling Curve Prize winners, as well as the 16 finalists for the new Climate Curve Prize: Methane award. The Keeling Curve Prize is a way of honoring groups and organizations that are contributing to lowering the Keeling Curve, which measures greenhouse gases. 

Founded in 2017 as the Global Warming Mitigation Project, Climate Curve has awarded over $2.73 million since 2018 to organizations and groups that are working as climate mitigators, and has a number of programs in numerous parts of the world. 

Jacquelyn Francis founded Climate Curve and also serves as its executive director. She said the impact of the organization has surpassed her expectations. 

“It’s incredibly challenging, yet just enlightening to create an organization like this,” Francis said. “I get to see innovative solutions around the world that are working in the most important space of designing a future, so I am so honored that this organization has become something that’s so effective and impactful throughout the world.”

She also said collective action and care for the environment is for everyone.

“It’s up to us … to make the future be beautiful and green and survivable,” Francis said.

This year’s efforts are in partnership with XPRIZE, a global nonprofit that hosts competitions to help encourage advancements within technology, climate change and more. 

The Climate Curve Prize: Methane award was launched “in order to fill a significant funding gap between methane solutions for oil and gas and those focused on agriculture and waste management — of which 60% of all anthropogenic methane emissions stem from,” a news release says.

This methane-specific approach will then allow eight winners to explore different methods of eliminating and mitigating harm from the greenhouse gas. Sixteen finalists will be announced during the ceremony on Wednesday. 

There will be 10 winners of the Keeling Curve Prize, which is in its ninth year. The finalists for the prize are sorted into five categories: Carbon sinks, energy, finance, social and cultural pathways, and transport and mobility. The finalists in their respective categories are listed alphabetically.

The carbon sinks finalists are: Airbuild Inc., which uses algae to clean polluted water and pull carbon out of the air; the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, which keeps forestry and ecosystem health initiatives within tribal control; the Inga Foundation, which helps with forestry, using Inga trees to rebuild degraded land in Honduras; and JUUNOO, which is using molecular wall systems to make interior walls more sustainable as well as reusable and fast in its use. 

The energy finalists include: Barefoot Global International, which helps women in remote areas around the globe become solar engineers and help their communities; Flint Paper Battery, which works to create batteries with safe materials, like zinc and manganese combined with paper-based materials; KBCols Sciences, which helps formulate clean and natural pigments so that clothing can be made more climate-friendly; and SEED, which is working to bring energy to climate-vulnerable island communities in India. 

The finance finalists are: The Delta Institute, which works in the midwest to focus on soil health; the Global Heat Reduction Initiative, which tracks superpollutants; the Tech Ascend Foundation, which helps lower-carbon water management technologies move to real world use; and xpand Foundation, which replants trees and repopulates forests in Timor-Leste. 

Social and cultural pathways finalists include: Asia Initiatives, which helps “rural communities design menus of actions” that evolve into climate projects; the Farmlink Project, which embeds food recovery as a normalized and fundable national system across North America; Pollen Patrollers, which works with farmers in Africa to make pollination impactful for land use emissions; and The Week, which helps people across the U.S. and Europe navigate climate change conversations more easily. 

The final category of transport and mobility includes: AlongRoute Data IKE, which provides weather reports of the ocean; LanzaJet, which produces non-oil jet fuel to lower emissions from air travel; LinQ Powr, which works on unreliable electricity that disrupts electric motorcycle charging and the growing pile of used EV batteries in East Africa; and Sesame Solar, which creates storage systems for hydrogen fuel. 

The respective winners and finalists will not be announced ahead of time. More information, including event tickets, can be found at climatecurve.org.