Cambridges go green at multi million dollar planet saver
The red carpet was green, stars were told not to wear anything new and Kate wore a 10-year-old Alexander McQueen dress. Welcome to William’s $92m planet saver awards.
Inspired by the Duke of Cambridge, they were saving the world one frock at a time. As an array of stars turned out for the inaugural awards ceremony for Prince William’s $92m (£50m) Earthshot Prize, the glittering occasion could at first glance have been mistaken for any showbusiness red carpet event.
But it was not a red carpet, it was green. And the celebrities were under strict instructions not to wear anything new for the ceremony at Alexandra Palace in London.
The Duchess of Cambridge wore a ten-year-old Alexander McQueen dress that she wore at the Bafta ceremony in 2011. The duke wore a green velvet jacket that had also had a previous outing.
Dame Emma Thompson, who was presenting one of the awards, said that guests had been told not to buy anything new for the evening. “Can you imagine the relief?” she said.
She wore the suit she had worn for her investiture by Prince William at Buckingham Palace, a ring her husband, Greg Wise, had bought “for 30 bucks in New York 26 years ago” and the badge of her damehood.
The Harry Potter actress Emma Watson wore an upscaled wedding dress made from ten dresses from Oxfam.
In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, the duke and duchess arrived at Alexandra Palace in an electric Audi.
Almost all the finalists stayed away to minimise carbon emissions. As Dermot O’Leary, who presented the event along with Clara Amfo, said: “In an awards ceremony first, we are delighted to say that no one has flown halfway round the world to be here.”
The awards ceremony, which included performances by Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes, and one by Coldplay powered by 60 cyclists, included five awards of £1 million each being given to inventors and innovators from around the world.
The winners included Costa Rica, which won for its efforts to fight deforestation, and the city of Milan, which won for a scheme to prevent food waste. Over the next ten years a total of fifty prizes of pounds 1 million each will be awarded to the people behind the best solutions to the world’s environmental problems so that they can expand and market their ideas.
The event, which was recorded three hours before it was transmitted on BBC1, was not without its mishaps. Thompson’s first attempt to present the prize for a waste-free world had to be reshot when her microphone failed to work, rendering her all but silent.
It was, she confessed, the result of a mishap with her microphone pack in the dark. “I broke my mic by dropping it down the lav,” she said.
The duchess presented the last award to Costa Rica, to protect and restore nature. “Nature is vital to us all,” she said. “A thriving natural world regulates our climate, nurtures our physical and mental health and helps feed our families. But for too long we’ve neglected our wild spaces and now we are facing a number of tipping points. If we don’t act now we will permanently destabilise our planet and we will rob our children of the future they deserve.
“Our Earthshot Prize finalists show us, however, that we can by 2030 see the natural world growing, not shrinking, for the first time in centuries.”
After the prizegiving William and Kate had a Zoom call with all the winners, who had received their awards by video link. William told Costa Rica, the winner of the healing nature category: “Fantastic your celebrations were quite wild. You were quite moved when you won and taken aback.”
Gator Halpern, a Liverpool fan and president of Coral Vita, winner of the revive our oceans category, which was presented by the footballer Mo Salah, said: “So surreal. I was tearing up as soon as I saw Mo Salah.”
Prince William came on at the end to announce that the next Earthshot Prize would be held in the US. In a message to young people he said: “For too long, we haven’t done enough to protect the planet for your future. The Earthshot is for you. In the next ten years we are going to act, we are going to find the solutions to repair our planet. Please keep learning, keep demanding change and don’t give up. We will rise to these challenges.”
Sir David Attenborough, a member of the Earthshot Prize council, which chose the winners, said: “The natural world on which we entirely depend is declining at a rate faster than at any time since the end of the dinosaurs.
“We know where this story is heading and we must now write a different ending. This is what the Earthshot Prize was created to achieve. The 15 Earthshot Prize finalists tonight build optimism by finding innovative and brilliant solutions to the world’s challenges, and they give us hope, which, we are told, springs eternal.”
The Times
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