Students Answer The Question ‘What Can I Do About Climate Change?’ (2025)

I received so many emails in response to last month’s article High Schoolers Offer Hope For A Post-Climate Future that I decided to post an update on the ongoing regional awards for The Earth Prize 2025. The Earth Prize is the world’s largest environmental competition and idea incubator for 13-19-year-olds, providing project participants with mentorship and funding. Like me, many readers were moved by the inventiveness and verve of these future scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have answered the question, “What can I do about climate change?”

This year, The Earth Foundation’s panel of distinguished judges will award one prize to each of seven regional winners in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania and Southeast Asia, Asia, and South and Central America. Each regional winner will receive a monetary prize and continued coaching and mentoring to help them commercialize their innovations.

Once the regional winners have been announced, a global winner will be determined by an online vote. Here is the link to cast your vote.

The European winner has already been announced: PURA, a two-person team that developed a household-sized wastewater purification device using a novel combination of photocatalysis and cold plasma technologies.

Team PURA is comprised of Tomáš Čermák (18) from Czechia and Anna Podmanická (19) from Slovakia. Anna had been researching using photocatalysis for water purification, while Tomáš was working on a way to use cold plasma to destroy pollutants and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in agricultural and hospital wastewater streams. They decided to combine their research to develop a unique solution to water quality issues exacerbated by climate change.

While photocatalysis and cold plasma solutions to water purification have been studied separately, PURA’s innovative combination of these technologies is a pioneering advance. PURA has built two household-size prototypes that they hope to scale up into a new tool to fight antibiotic resistance, which the World Health Organization projects will cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050.

The North American winner will be announced today (Tuesday, April 8, 2025), followed by another regional winner each day until the end of the week. Once all regional winners are announced, the public will vote for the overall winner.

The regional winners are announced on this page.

(UPDATE: Just as this article was going to print, the North American winner of The Earth Prize 2025 was announced! A team from New York City took the prize for an innovative solution that reduces plastic packaging waste. North America’s winning team, the StuyBigCompGroup is made up of three students, Zhi Han (Anthony), Flint, and James, from Stuyvesant High School.)

I spoke with The Earth Foundation’s founder, Peter McGarry, about the prize and was so impressed by his work that I volunteered to mentor next year’s winners. McGarry felt so strongly about the need for productive action that he bootstrapped the organization himself—his enthusiasm is palpable and infectious.

If you are asking what you can do about climate change, take a page from Tomáš, Anna, Zhi Han (Anthony), James, and Flint’s playbook and lean into building creative solutions to help our civilization and our planet. Politicians come and go; our world needs practical, durable climate tech solutions!