Young Climate Prize 2025 winners: the creatives designing for a better tomorrow

The winners of the Young Climate Prize 2025 have been announced, celebrating a new generation of creatives with innovative design ideas to help build a better world. The mentorship and award initiative launched in 2020 by the non-profit organisation The World Around has a two-year long cycle, making this year's '25 under 25' list of candidates only the second cohort of young creatives going through its process. The aim? To find the world's newest 'changemakers' and not only spotlight the next generation's fresh ideas but indeed help make them a reality.

Young Climate Prize 2025: the basics

The programme is designed to empower designers, activists, and innovators under the age of 25. Each of the young minds in every cycle's cohort is matched with a mentor from the creative industries, submitting a cause, idea or design to the competition, across six categories, including themes such as 'Building Community', 'Seeding Change', 'Making Matters', 'Sourcing Energy', 'Saving Water', and 'The New Narrators'. A series of meetings ensues, where mentors support the development of each project and its evolution into a viable product, campaign or piece of work, poised to foster change in the candidate's chosen topic - and bringing its young author's idea to life. It's a dynamic and fascinating process; and one that this writer experienced first-hand this year, as part of the group of mentors enlisted to help this cycle's candidates.

My experience as a Young Climate Prize mentor

'What do I know about birds?' was my first thought when I heard about the young trailblazer I was matched with. American university student Karinne Tennenbaum may be only 20 years old, but had been passionate about birding and promoting youth environmentalism through the magic of birdwatching for years – building a community, creating a dedicated podcast, immersing herself in the activity itself, and leading workshops and events to introduce more people to its value and fun.

What followed with a rich, and deeply rewarding experience where Karinne and I discussed her vision and campaign in detail, and identified goals, next steps and wildcard action pieces which might help her make her ambitions a reality. Supporting someone with as much passion and drive as this young student was interesting beyond the project's fascinating subject matter (of which, in the course of three sessions and several email exchanges, I learned a lot).

It soon became apparent that the scope of the mentorship scheme spanned marketing, content production, outreach, as well as communications and handling press - all subjects we slowly developed with my fresh eyes, her specialist insights, and an open, inquisitive mind.

I can take no credit for Karinne's keen sense of resolve, boundless energy and hard-working ethic – nor for her deep knowledge of her subject. Every meeting, when we logged off, I worried we'd made a list longer than she could ever possibly action in the handful of weeks before our next check-in; and every time she came back having done everything on that list and then some. In such a varied and impressive cohort (in terms of territory and areas of focus), it was apparent that the judges had a tough job ahead of them.

'Despite each of us in the cohort being from vastly different backgrounds and working on a wide variety of projects, we realised we faced similar challenges. We connected over struggling to access resources to expand our work and contemplated together how best to convey our unique stories to a global audience,' says Tennenbaum.

In the course of the mentorship stages, I hope that challenges became opportunities for Karinne, and new roads have opened ahead – regardless of the end result and the Prize's final announcement. Every single project in the 2025 group of candidates deserves support to achieve its goals and define the best way forward. With the expansive list of expert mentors employed across the board for the Prize, I am confident this was achieved.

'With the insight of my mentor and the cohort, the Young Climate Prize helped me combine all of my efforts in ornithological research, conservation, and education into a single cohesive narrative—one that I have been trying to weave for the last six years and can now share with the world,' says Tennenbaum.

Young Climate Prize 2025: the winners

This year's winners stood out for their transformative projects that show great potential to change lives. The award statement explains the projects span 'farm addressing food insecurity in a desert refugee community, a stove that reduces the effects of indoor air pollution while generating power to light energy-deprived homes, a youth movement that mobilizes climate action through the development of a community park, and a conservation initiative applying indigenous ecological knowledge to restore a polluted wetland reserve.'

The accolades - Young Climate Visionary, Young Climate Designer, Young Climate Voice, and a Jury Prize honoree - come with a $5,000 cash prize, along with airfare and accommodation for a trip to New York City to attend the Young Climate Prize awards ceremony during The World Around Summit 2025.

Mohamed Salem Mohamed Ali (23, Algeria)

Mentored by Brendan McGetrick, Mohamed Ali looks at desert agriculture through an experimental garden in Algeria’s Smara refugee camp, titled 'The Nomad Garden.' 'Farming in the desert is such a huge problem, and it touches on so many skills. Mohammed is thinking about it at his scale, which is really important because there are a lot of people in his same situation who don't have the knowledge to grow their own fruits or own crops to sustain themselves. The fact that he created his garden alone in order to solve a very basic human need, he has become a hero for his community and others,' says jury member Sheikha Reem Al Thani.

Kenneth Uche (24, Nigeria)

Battling Nigeria's indoor air pollution, Uche made a smokeless stove using recycled agricultural waste to fuel “briquettes” in an energy-efficient design created by locally sourced, recycled and affordable materials. He was mentored by Suchi Reddy. 'So many Africans today live without 24-hour power. Creating sustainable solutions allows us to exist in modernity, and Kenneth’s system that enables people to not just cook, but to charge phones, has so much potential to advance. This is such a brilliant project that builds off knowledge that existed already and learns from existing technologies to adapt and improve them. It’s something really novel, it's such a powerful personal story, and it's such a legible project,' says jury member Tosin Oshinowo.

Amara Nwuneli (17, Nigeria)

Mentored by Joseph Zeal-Henry, Nwuneli worked towards 'transforming an underutilised plot of land in a low-income Lagos community into a park, which will later serve as a hub for climate education, activism, and recreation. Jury member Aric Chen says: 'Amara is a powerful communicator who is using the strength of her voice and ability to communicate in order to create a movement. She has the advocacy to act on what she's discussing, which can allow her to expand so much bigger, and bring in a lot more people with more ideas than she could have had herself. Amara’s use of media, her charisma, and her ability to articulate her cause all embolden her activism.'

Dayana Blanco Quiroga (25, Bolivia)

Dayana Blanco Quiroga, an Aymara indigenous woman, and her Uru Uru Team have been hard at work ecologically treating the heavily polluted Uru Uru Lake in the Bolivian Andes. She was mentored by Sebastián Acampante. 'Dayana is engaged in a community of people interested in the same goal: applying traditional knowledge from very local historical and economical contexts, and using scarcity to produce a solution. This notion of using the natural world is very specific in terms of cultural impact, the understanding of belonging, and making systemic change,' says jury member Abraham Cruzvillegas.

theworldaround.com