Zayed Sustainability Prize Names 2027 Finalists After Record 10,233 Entries

The Zayed Sustainability Prize has narrowed a record field of 10,233 submissions from 177 countries down to its finalists for the 2027 edition — and for the first time, simply making the shortlist now comes with money attached.

The prize, once known as the Zayed Future Energy Prize, has grown well beyond its clean-energy roots. Its current shape spans six tracks: Health, Food, Energy, Water, Climate Action and Global High Schools.

A bigger pool, a wider remit

Entry numbers climbed 32% year over year, making this the most crowded cycle in the programme’s history. The expansion tracks with the prize’s broader scope, which now reaches into maternal health diagnostics, soil microbiology and reef restoration as readily as it does solar hardware.

Organisers have also changed how the money flows. Every finalist now leaves with funding, not just the category winners.

Prize Structure: US$100,000 guaranteed to each organisational finalist · US$25,000 to each Global High Schools finalist · Winners take US$1 million (organisational) or US$150,000 (schools)

The guaranteed payouts were introduced with the 2026 cycle, a nod to the fact that solutions reaching the last stage of judging tend to have already proven themselves in the field.

Health and food lead the shortlist

Among the Health contenders, US-based Elythea uses first-trimester data and AI to flag pregnancy complications six to eight months ahead, with more than 63,000 direct beneficiaries and a five-country trial behind it. Spain’s Marsi Bionics brings a paediatric exoskeleton with robotic joints that mirror muscle movement, already fitted to over 3,000 children. GOAL 3, from the Netherlands, pairs bedside vital-sign monitoring with tablet-based records across 48 hospitals.

On the Food side, three finalists attack soil and waste from different angles:

• Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (US): fungal endophytes plus beneficial soil bacteria, applied across more than 13 million acres, with reported yield gains of 30–200%.
• ALSEC Alimentos Secos (Colombia): a solar-powered plant turning cheese-making whey into protein ingredients and clean water.
• TOWING (Japan): a microbe-enhanced biochar marketed as “Soratan” that claims to rebuild soil in about a month rather than three to five years.

Energy, water and climate

Nigeria’s Energy Assured covers pay-as-you-go solar home systems, clean cookstoves and shared solar irrigation pumps, with a reach of 4.6 million people. Singapore’s Flint is developing a rechargeable cellulose-based battery built on zinc-manganese electrodes — no lithium, cobalt, nickel or flammable electrolyte — with capacity for 400,000 units a month. India’s Sustain Plus blends clean energy hardware with community ownership and mixed finance, having deployed over 34,000 decentralised systems.

Water finalists include Bolivia’s Fundación Aguatuya, which recovers roughly 1.08 million m³ of treated wastewater annually for irrigation and compost, and India’s Solinas, whose robotic crawlers inspect and clean pipes from the inside.

On climate, Coral Gardeners of French Polynesia has planted more than 221,000 corals and restored 25,100 m² of reef using heat-tolerant stock, sensors and 3D mapping. Peru’s Aquafondo revives ancestral high-Andean water systems, and India’s String Bio turns methane into a microbial biostimulant for rice paddies.

Student teams from six regions round out the Global High Schools category, with Canada, Colombia and Argentina among the contenders from the Americas.

Winners will be confirmed in the coming months. For now, the message from this cycle is fairly plain: the prize is casting a much wider net, and it is paying the people it catches.