Earthshot Prizewinners Commended

The Alleyn’s Earthshot Prize came about through the Alleyn’s Learner's Programme and the need to give our Year 11s a way of finding balance and moments of peace in a busy year.

Part of this is a course called “The Truth”, where we explore Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and apply this thinking to the issue of our climate and biodiversity crisis, with the aim of becoming critically informed and taking meaningful action. The Alleyn’s Earthshot Prize was created as an outcome to this project – a solutions-based prize to identify an issue and to use reliable information to achieve a solution.

This year’s competition

The Alleyn’s Earthshot Prize judges were genuinely overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions this year and awarded two runners-up prizes:

Caetlinn and Theo's "Revive our ponds" plan to reform the School ponds in order to increase biodiversity, make it more habitable for local wildlife and allow opportunities for involvement in the pond’s wellbeing and development from all areas of the School.

Melody and Isabella's "Save the Bees" campaign to raise awareness about the threat to our bees, and advocate for protective measures including the use of less harmful pesticides and vertical farming techniques.

Our winners were Reuben and Gabriel with "Honestly Green" – a proposal to introduce rigour and self-reflection into green pledges by asking questions such as ‘is it relevant? Is it specific? Is it effective? Is it maintainable?’

Reuben and Gabriel devised an acronym by which all pledges should be assessed:

Assess

Brainstorm

Clarify

Disambiguate

Enact

Facts

As the world turns its eye to the issues surrounding climate change and biodiversity loss, the threat is that greenwashing leads to misinformation and complacency. The judges loved Reuben and Gabriel's honesty and rigour in defining a framework for challenging us all to look more deeply and actually get this right. Gabriel and Reuben will have a tree planted in their names on the school grounds.

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