To combat global warming and prevent the increase in Earth's average temperature from exceeding 2OC, it will be necessary to extract around 10 gigatons of CO2 of the atmosphere per year until 2050. The challenge is so relevant to humanity that the Elon Musk Foundation is offering US$ 100 million for the best projects to solve the issue.
This is one of the competitions that are open on XPRIZE, an award that encourages crowdsourcing on a global scale to develop solutions to the biggest challenges of our time. “It’s never too late to use human creativity, innovation and competition to rewrite our history and create a better future,” says XPRIZE CEO Anousheh Ansari.
A recent example: faced with the challenges brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, XPRIZE launched a competition offering US$ 6 million to the team that developed, in six months, rapid and accessible tests to detect the disease. The winners created a cheaper test, which delivers results in 12 hours – and took US$ 6 million home.
XPRIZE was created in 1994 by Peter Diamandis, with the aim of challenging people to discover new ways to solve humanity's complex challenges. It all started with the provocation to enable private trips to space, which inspired initiatives that today are very close to becoming reality with Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX (founded, by the way, by Musk himself).
Today, this non-profit organization based in California (United States) has the support of major partners, such as Google, IBM and the Elon Musk Foundation, to offer millionaire prizes to anyone who brings innovative and sustainable solutions to issues such as balancing carbon emissions carbon dioxide, better understand the biodiversity of tropical forests and expand the use of artificial intelligence to solve global problems.
In 27 years, XPRIZE has launched 25 competitions and distributed US$ 269 million in prizes, in addition to gathering more than a million supporters around the world. One of the most recent is Fabricio Bloisi, president of iFood – Brazilian bigtech, a reference in Latin America -, which joined the XPRIZE Innovation board in June 2021.
“We deeply believe that in the future companies will take on a role beyond their businesses and will solve problems in our society and with global urgency. Technology has changed people's lives, the way we pay bills, how we travel, how we interact and how we eat. We currently innovate with agility in building a sustainable ecosystem for customers, partners and society. Now, let's scale innovation for the benefit of humanity. Let's promote technology and inovation leading Brazil to develop excellent research, as a lever in the transformation against urgent global causes, such as large-scale carbon removal, and guarantee a more promising future for our country and the world”, highlights Fabrício.
To participate in the competitions, simply enter the website XPRIZE and register for the desired challenge.
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