XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity – fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.‎ This four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably. To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.

Small grants and pro-bono professional support for smaller nonprofits is available from the ERM Foundation. This foundation invests in organizations and programs that focus on:

• Protecting and restoring biodiversity (including environmental education)
• Improving access to low carbon products and services
• Investing in women’s livelihoods in the ‘green’ economy
• Improving access to clean water and sanitation

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis to this grant program for grassroots projects. Grants do not exceed $5,000, and the organization aims to award $100,000 in funding throughout 2022.

Story of Stuff gives grants to BIPOC led and serving groups with a budget of $50,000 or less that focus on water privatization, plastic pollution, and other environmental justice focus areas.

The Cornell Douglas foundation is seeking applications from non-profits working on environmental health and justice, land conservation, mountaintop removal mining, sustainability of resources, watershed protection, and financial literacy for elementary and high school students. Their grant size average is $15,000 – $50,000.

Nonprofits are eligible to apply for this prize focused on creating a national innovation messaging campaign for the Urban and Community Forestry Program (U&CF). The campaign should also address national priorities of environmental and climate justice.

Partnership collaboration is required and projects are to be completed within 2 years. All grant funds must be matched at least equally with non-federal sources.

For the LG Chem Global Innovation Challenge – Sustainable Solutions, we are on the lookout for game-changing players with disruptive technologies that are ready to scale their impact and leverage the network, expertise, and funding of Korea’s largest chemical company. Benefits: leverage and access LG Chem’s global network, various types of funding with the size of 9 billion USD up to 2025 in total, collaboration opportunities with a variety of experts to scale up your technology, work with LG Chem’s both Business and R&D departments.

Apply to a new program from the DOE related to community-scale climate research. Research will focus on three tightly related scientific topics—atmospheric and environmental observations; modeling of climate change and impacts across urban regions; and simulating the climate benefits of deploying climate solutions and technologies in historically underserved communities across the U.S.

Urban IFLs will require multi-disciplinary teams that bring together the skills and talents of investigators from multiple research institutions. Academic and nonprofit research institutions, national laboratories, other federal agencies, and the private sector are all eligible to apply as Urban IFL team members. The lead organization of each proposed Urban IFL team must be an academic institution or a national laboratory. Locally-based team members and minority serving institutions (MSI) are expected to have significant roles in each Urban IFL.

Funding is to be awarded competitively and is expected to be in the form of five-year awards. The Department anticipates that $17 million will be available for this program in 2022. Requests should not exceed $5,000,000 per year.

This FOA (Funding Opportunity Announcement) supports two priority areas in the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) research and development (R&D) portfolio. The first of these priority areas addresses new strategies for energy and resource recovery from waste streams.  The second priority area addressed by this FOA targets improved organisms and inorganic catalysts.

Apply to any of the following topics: (1) MSW Feedstock Technologies, (2) Robust Microbial Cells, (3) Robust Catalytic Processes, and (4) Community Scale Resource and Energy Recovery from Organic Wastes.

The Shine On Awards will recognize communications campaigns that are successful in increasing solar energy adoption and/or solar workforce recruitment and retention among a diverse target audience and that cross a variety of mediums, including digital, print, event, video, mobile, podcast, marketing, social media, audio, and more. Excellent campaigns will be able to show evidence that their campaign has had a positive, meaningful impact on their target audience. Examples of targeted, effective, and inclusive campaign goals could include but are not limited to:

• Increased solar adoption rates among the target audience,
• Savings on electrical bills among the target audience,
• Decreased energy burden among the target audience,
• Reduction in pollution or other environmental harm due to solar adoption in target communities or areas,
• Increased knowledge and positive sentiment among the target audience about the benefits of solar energy,
• Increased opportunities for the target audience to join, stay in, or advance in the solar workforce, or
• Increased solar jobs in the target communities or areas.

Winners will be publicly announced by the Department of Energy (DOE) and invited to participate in a DOE-hosted webinar on communications and outreach best practices. Winners’ best practices will also be used to develop a guide to encourage greater adoption of these practices. No cash prizes will be awarded.

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research aimed at strengthening America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. Achieving these objectives requires the integration of expertise from across all science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how fundamental knowledge about human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Successful projects will represent a convergence of expertise in one or more SBE sciences deeply integrated with other disciplines to support substantial and potentially pathbreaking, fundamental research applied to strengthening a specific and focal infrastructure.

The Transformative Climate Communities Program (TCC) invests in community-led climate resilience projects in the California’s most disadvantaged communities. The program objectives are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve public health and the environment, and support economic opportunity and shared prosperity. TCC’s unique, place-based strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is designed to catalyze collective impact through a combination of community-driven climate projects in a single neighborhood. TCC Implementation Grants support an integrated set of projects within a neighborhood project area of approximately five square miles. Projects must reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly over time, leverage additional funding sources, and provide health, environmental and economic benefits to the community.