Verizon, GreenBiz and the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Climate Resilience Center will announce three winners that will share $500,000 in the inaugural Climate Resilience Prize in February.
The program is part of Citizen Verizon, which the company calls its “responsible business plan for economic, environmental and social advancement.” The prize competition will recognize initiatives from innovators that have been active in the market and are ready to scale. The winners will be in-market solutions that are aimed at reducing the effects of climate change on at-risk communities.
The application period, which opened on October 26 at GreenBiz’s VERGE 21 Conference, will run until November 30. The winners will be announced at the GreenBiz 22 annual conference in February. The prize pool will be shared among entrants in three categories: next-gen tech solutions, frontline community-led solutions and nature-based solutions. There will be one winner from each category.
Verizon recently announced its third $1 billion green bond, with the net proceeds expected to be allotted entirely to renewable energy. The carrier, which claims to be the leading corporate buyer of renewable energy in the United States, has entered into 14 Virtual Power Purchase Agreements (VPPAs) totaling almost 1.9 gigawatts of renewable energy.
In April, Verizon launched the Forward for Good Accelerator, which aims to lead to meaningful social change through new technologies including 5G, mobile edge computing, artificial intelligence and extended reality. The program focuses on start-ups with solutions that are aimed at pressing social issues.
“At Verizon, we’re working to innovate next-gen solutions to help address climate change impacts and leave the world better than we found it,” Rose Stuckey Kirk, the Chief Corporate Social Responsibility Officer for Verizon, said in a press release. “We know it’s going to take a network of innovators to develop the solutions we need, and this Climate Resilience Prize is one way in which we can propel game-changing ideas with proven results to scale, so everyone has an equitable chance to thrive as climate changes.”
