New York design firm Yellow Studio unveiled its stage design for The 2023 Earthshot Prize Awards in Singapore, which the BBC broadcasted on Sunday, 12 November. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshot” challenge in 1962 to land a man on the moon within a decade, The Earthshot Prize was launched by Prince William in 2020 to search for and scale the most innovative solutions to the world’s greatest environmental challenges.

Its challenge to the world is based on five Earthshots – simple but ambitious and universal goals for 2030 developed in collaboration with leading environmental experts. They are Protect and Restore Nature; Clean our Air; Revive our Oceans; Build a Waste-Free World; and Fix our Climate

For the prestigious global environmental prize, Yellow Studio designed a stage that reflected Singapore’s “Garden City” vision that fuses nature and urban design. Home to 5.4 million people, Singapore’s efforts at fusing population density and nature began in the 1960s. The country’s urban development has played an important role in creating an environment that is not only sustainable but also a stress-free one, especially for its professionals, as more and more buildings in the country have been adopting biophilic design. Yellow Studio has reflected Singapore’s biophilic architecture approach in the design of The 2023 Earthshot Prize, with natural vegetation integrated into the stage design, mirroring the manmade and natural world living harmoniously together.

Yellow Studio took careful measures to ensure the set was as sustainable as possible. The stage design comprises a 12-meter round halo installation and a series of oversized panels that flank the stage, all made up of living plants from nearby Malaysia, which will be replanted following the ceremony. Minimising its carbon footprint, locals built the stage, and the materials used in the build have been recycled from previous shows and will be reused again.

Prince William and The Earthshot Prize revealed the 2023 Earthshot Prize winners – an accomplished group of entrepreneurs and innovators spearheading ground-breaking solutions to repair and regenerate the planet. Each winner was awarded a £1 million prize.

This year’s winners are Acción Andina, a grassroots, community-based initiative working across South America to protect native high Andean forest ecosystems, GRST’s solution that offers a pathway to make electric cars of the future even cleaner, Wildaid Marine Programme a global non-profit organization to end illegal fishing and strengthen ocean conservation, S4S Technologies’ solar-powered dryers and processing equipment to combat food waste, and Boomitra who are removing emissions and boosting farmer profits by incentivising land restoration through a verified carbon-credit marketplace.