Equator Prize 2025 for indigenous or locally-led climate efforts (USD 10,000 Prize)

Application Deadline: 23 February, 2025

Applications are now open for the 2025 Equator Prize. The Equator Initiative is a United Nations-led partnership that brings together governments, civil society, grassroots organizations, and businesses to foster resilient communities by recognizing and advancing local nature-based solutions for sustainable development. The Equator Initiative creates opportunities and platforms to share knowledge and good practices, develops capacities of Indigenous peoples and local communities, informs policy through convening multi-stakeholder dialogues, and fosters enabling environments to replicate and scale up community action.

The Equator Prize 2025 will be awarded to outstanding Indigenous Peoples and local community-led initiatives that advance innovative nature-based solutions for sustainable development, in alignment with the Global Biodiversity Framework. The winners will join a prestigious network of 296 leading community-based organizations from around 84 countries that have been awarded the Equator Prize since 2002. Each Equator Prize winner will receive USD 10,000 and will be supported to participate in a series of policy dialogues and special events in the fall of 2025.

Equator Prize 2025 Theme:  Nature for Climate Action

This year’s Equator Prize will recognize innovative initiatives that showcase how action on nature, led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, can provide effective climate solutions, and demonstrate effective pathways to transform our global systems for people and Planet. Winning initiatives will be honored for their successes in protecting, restoring, and/or sustainably managing nature for nature-positive development outcomes.

Thematic priorities include:

• Nature for Climate Mitigation, Adaptation and Resilience. Actions to protect, conserve, and restore forests, mangroves, peatlands, soils, oceans, and marine ecosystems, as well as actions to build climate-resilient food systems and develop regenerative agriculture and forestry practices to adapt to climate change. These include actions to:

1. 1. Maintain intact ecosystems as they sequester better; forests, mangroves, peatlands, and soils are the greatest natural carbon stores;
   2. Uphold Indigenous Peoples’ land tenure, governance, rights, and Traditional knowledge, as they are essential to protect forests and key ecosystems;
   3. Achieve forest protection through participatory monitoring and large-scale mapping and spatial planning efforts;
   4. Recognize and allow Indigenous land defenders and local youth activists to lead initiatives for climate mitigation, justice, and build community resilience to adapt to climate change;
   5. Tackle water security, which is key for life, by protecting and restoring ecosystems critical to water resources at all levels, including continental;
   6. Transform our food systems to be more climate-resilient, less carbon-intensive, and adaptable to climate change; and
   7. Promote nature-based solutions to reduce the impacts of natural disasters, such as floods and droughts, by restoring and protecting key ecosystems.

For More Information:

Visit the Official Webpage of the Equator Prize