Giving Compass' Take:

• Adele Peters reports that the Roddenberry Prize for organizations addressing climate change went to unusual winners: food waste, meat reduction, girls education, and women's rights. 

• How does your mission align with climate change progress? What can funders do to elevate unusual solutions? 

• Learn about the dangers of philanthropy contests. 

On the top 10 list of climate solutions in Project Drawdown, a project that studies the most effective ways to tackle global warming, some are obvious, like wind turbines and solar farms. A new competition highlights four solutions that are more unexpected: educating girls, women’s rights, reducing food waste, and eating less meat.

“Really, the motivation is to let the world know that there are other ways of thinking about climate change,” says Lior Ipp, CEO of the Roddenberry Foundation (the foundation endowed by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry), which awarded four organizations $250,000 each today as winners of its biennial Roddenberry Prize. “We need to expand the range in which we think about it. This isn’t just going to be solar panels or solar farms or electric cars. These other issues are really important. And by the way, they’re important in their own right. This is what attracted us to this idea as well. We should be investing in girls’ education and women’s rights regardless of whether it has an impact on the environment.”

In part, the foundation wanted to highlight how much climate action is possible now–without waiting for breakthroughs in technology or relying on governments to adopt better policy. And some of the most pivotal actions can be done on an individual scale, like reducing food waste and eating less meat.

Read the full article about climate prize money for organizations working with food waste and women and girls by Adele Peters at FastCompany.