Jean-Claude Burgelman is the director of the Frontiers Planet Prize, a global annual competition organized by the Frontiers Foundation, to bring actionable science to policy, industry and the public. He is also currently editor-in-chief of Frontiers Policy Lab. Before retiring in 2020 Burgelman was in charge of Open Science Policies at the European Commission. Until 2000 he was a full professor of communication technology policy at the Free University of Brussels and is now a professor emeritus. He is currently on the advisory boards of Open Knowledge Maps, an AI-based search engine for scientific knowledge, and is co-founding an AI startup platform in Brussels that will focus on AI for cities. Burgelman recently spoke to The Innovator about this year’s Frontiers Planet Prize and why it is important for business to get involved.
Q: This week the Frontiers Planet Prize once again rewarded transformative scientific research to help scale real-world sustainability solutions. Can you tell us about the prize?
JCB: The whole idea of the Frontiers Planet Prize is very simple: faced with the planetary crisis the prize is shining a light on transformative scientific research that will help scale real-world sustainability solutions. The prize operates as a rigorous process to identify, validate and amplify breakthroughs and fosters interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration among communities, scientists and youth leaders.
There are over 10,000 scientists in the competition and 610 participating research institutions in 62 countries. Universities around the world nominate their most impactful peer-reviewed studies from the previous two years. National academies select three national nominees based on scientific excellence and societal impact, then a jury of 100 top scientists in sustainability research and earth-system science select the National Champions for each participating country. There are also three International Champions named from the pool of National Champions. Each of the three are awarded $1 million to scale up their work. Our selection is as stringent as that of the Nobel Prize committee. Think of the Frontiers Planet Prize as a type of Nobel Prize for mission-driven science focused on sustainability.
Q: Who are this year’s three International Champions this year?
JCB: One of the prizes announced this week went to Dr. Arunima Malik from the University of Sydney in Australia. Her research focuses on quantifying the environmental and social impacts of international supply chains with a particular emphasis on how it affects progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Her study explores the impact of global demand for goods and services on environmental and social issues, particularly focusing on outsourcing of resource-intensive production. By examining trends from 1990 to 2018, her research highlights how trade can both polarize and equalize progress between the Global North and South, influencing the ability to meet SDGs by 2030.
Another prize went to Professor Zahra Kalantari, from Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Using a data-driven approach, her research identifies high-impact areas for green infrastructure, urban forests, and sustainable streetscapes, potentially reducing emissions in urban areas by 57.3% by 2030. The framework provides cities with practical tools to meet climate neutrality targets, enhance urban resilience, and guide both public planners and private developers in utilizing nature-based solutions to offset greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. Zia Mehrabi, from the U.S.’s University of Colorado Boulder was also a winner. By uniting researchers and farmers across continents, his research provides the first cross-cultural evidence that diversification practices can bring farming systems within planetary boundaries, reduce environmental impacts, and support livelihoods. The research outlines practical interventions for governments, NGOs, and civil society, offering clear pathways for policy implementation and demonstrating the importance of investment in these areas for sustainable and just global food systems.
Q: Which of the winners so far stand out in terms of potential impact?
JCB: JCB: This is our third edition which will celebrate 3 new International Champions. In total, we have named 10 International Champions, from more than 60 National Champions. It’s a rich corpus of top scientists, which the world of science recognizes as working on breakthrough science. All of them. So, I feel a bit uncomfortable singling out a few. If I had to choose, besides the International Champions already mentioned, I would name three.
Last year’s National Champion from Denmark, Minik Rosing’s research found that naturally occurring rock flour produced by a billion tons every year by the Greenland Ice Sheet can dramatically increase global crop yield and reduce CO2 in the atmosphere through application in agriculture globally.
Inaugural prize winner Carlos Peres’ work demonstrated how indigenous peoples and local communities in the Brazilian Amazon are successfully protecting territories from deforestation and overfishing, especially through sustainable arapaima management. Ultimately this is catalyzing locally agreed arrangements to ensure community-based protection of 15 million hectares of Amazon floodplain forests, benefiting 140 local communities in the State of Amazonas alone. Prize money supported the development of non-profit “Instituto Jurua” – focusing on community based-conservation. Community-enforced ‘no-fishing’ zones and sustainable harvest limits have led to a 600% increase in historically overexploited arapaima populations over 20 years, generating about $9,000 annually per lake for local infrastructure, healthcare, and education. Consolidation of a Juruá river basin-wide conservation model that also ensures enhanced local livelihoods, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and market access for some 50,000 people. This has caught the attention of state and federal authorities and policymakers and this transformative program will likely feature in the COP30 Summit in Belém, Brazil later this year.
2024 International Champion Jason Rohr’s research focuses on a groundbreaking project in West Africa looking at schistosomiasis, a devastating parasitic disease affecting millions, thrives in water bodies overrun by invasive vegetation that grows due to agricultural fertilizer runoff. Scientists discovered that removing this vegetation dramatically reduces the disease in schoolchildren. Instead of discarding it, they turned it into compost, livestock feed, and even fuel—creating a sustainable, profitable cycle for local communities. The research resulted in a 46% reduction in disease risk, with the potential to substantially reduce disease across the around 100,000 people currently involved in the trials
As one can see: the science we celebrate has an impact on changing the planet for the better. And that is exactly why we created this prize
Q: Is business helping to support the prize?
JCB: Up until now the prizes have been exclusively funded by Frontiers via the Frontiers Research Foundation, which was founded by Henry Markram, a distinguished professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL) who co-founded the scientific publisher Frontiers, with his wife, neuroscientist Kamila Markram. The founders could have bought a boat or an island, but they prefer to invest their profit in this. Why? Because they are convinced that we need to do something for the planet and because they are certain science is essential for that. After all, it was science that found a vaccine against COVID.
Q: Why should business get involved?
JCB: If we can close the loop and convince business to support the Frontiers Planet Prize, it will lead to more actionable science. It will create a virtuous cycle that could produce a huge array of technological solutions to address the climate emergency. While there is no direct return to business in the short term, there is a gigantic direct return in the mid-to-long-term because even if you deny climate change, it will affect you. It will affect you because the cost of insurance, the cost of doing, and missing out on, business will increase. There are many, many studies about economic losses in a business-as-usual scenario. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, quoted this week in his speech at the Frontiers Planet Prize event that the cost of business as usual will amount to 19% of GDP by 2050. You can debate this and say maybe it is 17% or maybe it’s 13%, but it is still a massive amount. So that’s why we need to join forces. Participating in our prize is an investment for a better world simply because we need a healthy planet to flourish. The reason why we have the society we have now is that for the last 12,000 years the planetary conditions were more or less stable, if that starts to change, and it is changing, that stability disappears, and hence, all the potentiality that the planet offers us to do business, to have social relations, and what have you, will also change in one way or another.
With COVID, we saw on the fly, on the spot, in real time, people dying, and an exponential growth of that. That motivated the world to join forces, to find the vaccine, and in record time we solved the problem. I’m quite sure we can do the same for the planetary crisis, but we face the problem that we don’t see people dying on the spot. We see problems. We see fires and we see here, in Switzerland, the glaciers falling apart. The causality between the danger and doing something is different than with any other problem that we face in the world. That makes it so difficult to get people to understand that they need to invest but if we wait until it is clear enough to everyone that we need to do something, it will be too late. We have until 2050. There is a gigantic cost in not investing, so it is not only ethically irresponsible, it is also a poor decision economically.
There is not only a moral imperative to behave responsibly, there’s a business opportunity. Someone could very easily come up with a public/private partnership to manage the Amazon based on the research of one of our international winners and earn some money. The same is true for naturally occurring rock flour produced by a billion tons every year by the Greenland Ice Sheet. Someone could build a company with Minik Rosing, our 2024 National Champion from Denmark, and start crushing the rocks to rejuvenate the soil in the rest of the world. The opportunity is not only to avoid climate change getting worse, but the opportunity is also to create new businesses and reinvent the business practices of today.Investing in us and the science we celebrate is investing in the economy of the future. Be first!
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