The Global Prize story

Purpose

The Global Prize is a biennial environmental award for the participating academic institutions’ researchers of any career stage who have already published, top-quality research that has transformative and transboundary implications for addressing climate change-induced issues globally. The prize will be awarded to the partner university-endorsed applicants who are affiliated as staff members with the university (part-time, full-time, permanent or fixed term) whose scientific research demonstrates the greatest potential to address these critical issues. Each Global Prize award recipient will be presented with a certificate of merit and €200,000 (200,000 euros) in prize money for the member university, allocated to the university, to further the recipient’s area of research.

“Which conversations will still matter in fifty years, when today’s targets are long forgotten? In half a century, most of today’s targets will be marginalia. That thought kept returning – not as a notion, but as a summons. If treaties can stall and headlines move on, what holds the thread? What endures is long memory: the habit of returning, patiently and together, to problems that outlast generations and the empires of fashion. Universities were designed for that patience. They are among the few institutions built to last, to keep speaking across generations. The Global Climate Research Prize began there: not as a campaign, but as a way to keep a particular conversations going – and to invite others in. Clare Hall’s lineage gave this instinct a home. The College’s climate inheritance runs through Professor Sir Nicholas Shackleton, whose research was fundamental to our understanding of long-term climate change. Set alongside a broader record of Fellows later recognised at the highest levels across the sciences, social sciences and the arts, the lesson is simple: insight travels best when boundaries are porous. In that same spirit Clare Hall has joined with LUT University, whose mission points squarely to Earth’s systems – clean energy, clean water, clean air and a sustainable planet – so that the whole institution is oriented towards climate and its solutions. Alongside laboratories and field sites, we kept returning to culture, for example, to whether and how climate appears in the stories millions absorb in novels and television, in cinema, and in the lyric of a chart hit. Soft power often decides what societies count as possible; its silences shape attention. For that reason, from the start, the humanities sit alongside the sciences and engineering in our frame. Conversation and dialogue have been in the Prize’s very DNA from the outset; indeed, they are the lifeblood of Clare Hall, of the collegiate university, and of research itself. This was no consultancy commission: the Prize emerged, unexpectedly yet coherently, from a sustained sequence of exacting conversations among scholars across disciplines. It was co-founded by Professor Alan Short, President of Clare Hall, a world-renowned authority on sustainable architecture, and a senior figure within the University of Cambridge. The Prize took shape, throughout the years of its preparation, in continuous conversation with Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society, widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in science; his contribution has been of founding weight. With Professor Emily Shuckburgh OBE, we deliberated what global may mean in practice – plural regions and methods – while Dr Shaun Fitzgerald FREng OBE discussed about engineering tractability, and the courage to call for radical innovations where needed. Honorary Professor Andrew Blake counselled on whether – and how – to bring AI within scope: only where it clarifies rather than obscures, with attention to interpretability, energy use and bias, and with human judgement firmly in the loop. The sustained contributions of Per Reiff-Musgrove and Francé Davies were essential to the original conception; they also posed the questions that give the project staying power: who will feel able to participate, how “global” is kept from becoming a slogan, and how the process remains legible to scholars far from Cambridge. From LUT University, Chairperson Teresa Kemppi-Vasama, Rector Juha-Matti Saksa, Janne Hokkanen, Petri Ajo and Elina Huculak encouraged us to think in systems and – in Nordic style – to let any network grow slowly, transparently, in an egalitarian, down-to-earth and ethical way, and with room to change shape. Their contribution has been essential throughout the development of the Prize. Also, number of other people have been involved in the discussions and have helped throughout the process. Accordingly, we designed the Prize as a conversation before a ceremony. We began with a small circle of leading universities to seed a commons with high trust. Each institution nominates one set of already-published research – laboratory, field, archive or studio – that changes how we might act on climate. Nominees meet one another’s work; judges listen as much as they assess. We will widen the circle little by little, inviting new participating organisations and researchers as our capacity for real listening grows. And as the network matures, we may, where useful, create parallel recognitions for the humanities and for the sciences, while keeping both in the same room. This Prize sits alongside many admirable awards; its particular tuning is one of tempo and intent. It is shaped for continuity and cohort – for the kind of exchange that helps robust ideas travel across sectors and geographies, and also across imaginations. It asks, quite practically, how ideas move -from paper to prototype, from archive to policy, from narrative to norm. The proper test of conversation is to depart with better questions than were brought, and with interlocutors one would hope to meet again. Universities exist to sustain such exchanges across time; they lend memory to enquiry and afford science and culture the leisure to inform one another without haste. Less a laurel than a covenant, the Prize commits scholarship to an exacting, generous conversation oriented to the public good, and keeps the door ajar between disciplines, so that knowledge may cross into responsibility.” -Professor Hannele Seeck, originator and co-founder of the Prize