£39mln funding for climate innovations

The Royal Academy of Engineering is awarding the equivalent of 44 Nobel prizes for developing UK climate crisis solutions.

Thirteen innovators receive £3mln each to develop solutions that tackle multiple causes of the climate crisis, and mitigate and adapt to its impacts. The money will help them scale their work from the lab and prototypes into commercially viable technologies over 10 years.

The first awardees include innovators developing technologies that turns waste CO₂ into products like plastics, fuels and chemicals, engineers creating more efficient and recyclable solar panels, and a project to extract critical metals for batteries, magnets, solar panels and fuel cells by filtering salty water. 

The Royal Academy of Engineering highlighted the work of:

• Professor Laura Torrente’s from the University of Cambridge is using renewable electricity, water and nitrogen from air to produce ammonia cleanly and safely. 
• Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University is developing a new type of memory that uses extremely short bursts of terahertz radiation – light pulses a thousand times faster than today’s technology.
• Professor Robert House at the University of Oxford is developing a new type of battery that’s four times more energy dense than current lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, making them much lighter and more powerful for electric or hybrid aeroplanes. 

Other innovations use sound waves to destroy forever chemicals in water and soil as an alternative to pyrolytic incineration, use special microbes to convert carbon dioxide into clean hydrogen using green electricity, capture and convert CO₂ from manufacturing processes, and use advanced filters to extract precious metals, like lithium, from salt water. 

Applicants can come from any country, however as a UK-funded initiative, they must locate their work in the UK.

The solutions developed by the Green Future Fellows must deliver impact that benefits the UK, alongside any global impact.

The application period for the second round of funding closed in November with awardees to be announced in early 2027, while a third round is expected to open for applications in Autumn 2026. An Accelerated International Route is also open for exceptional non-UK-based applicants.

The Green Future Fellowships are funded by a £150mln, long-term investment from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. 

You can find out more about the Green Future Fellowships, including how to apply for future cohorts online.