For the first time, women scientists win $1 million climate research prize

From ScienceMag:

The crowd gathered in an auditorium in the Swiss village of Villars on Tuesday applauded as, one by one, three scientists—two women and a man—stepped onto the stage to accept a plaque and their prize of 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) for research into solutions for the ongoing climate crisis. It marked the first time in the Frontiers Planet Prize’s (FPP’s) 3-year history that a woman, let alone two, has won.

Gerard Rocher-Ros, a 2024 finalist and ecologist at Umeå University, was an outspoken critic of the lack of women winners in previous years. This year’s lineup—Arunima Malik, a University of Sydney sustainability researcher; Zahra Kalantari, an environmental and geosciences engineer at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and Zia Mehrabi, a climate and agriculture data scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder—“was very comforting to see,” he says.

The women winners also view the award as an important step for highlighting women’s contributions to science. “I see this award as a recognition that we are also among the men, that we are [also] working hard to come up with solutions … to address the social challenges that we are facing,” says Kalantari, whose work focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of cities. And Malik’s winning paper, about the sustainability of supply chains and global trade routes, was written with multiple women as co-authors, she points out.

In the first 2 years the prize was awarded, all seven winners were men, a trend that led a group of women finalists to pen an open letter last year to FPP Director Jean-Claude Burgelman and others, criticizing the committee’s process for disadvantaging and failing to reward women scientists. (Science was unable to reach the authors of last year’s letter for comment.)

Prize administrators say there was no intentional change in the award process, chalking up the difference in this year’s results to “pure coincidence.” The FPP jury does not consider the gender of the lead scientist while deliberating, says jury chair Johan Rockström.

Despite the positive change this year, systemic inequities in scientific research awards can persist because the prize rules require that research institutions nominate a single representative from the team behind a published paper. These representatives are part of a pool to be the sole national champion representing their country and finalists for the FPP. The structure effectively means these solo winners are also the sole recipients of the prize money; a strategic choice meant to facilitate investment into the winning project and optimize real-world impact, organizers say.

But with this winner-take-all system, nominating bodies may be likelier to elevate more established, senior researchers—who are predominantly men—to increase their chances of winning the money. The FPP website urges nominating bodies to actively confront unconscious biases. Still, more than half of this year’s 19 finalists were men or from countries in the Global North.

Prizes that award single researchers can also reinforce “the great man myth”—the idea that scientific knowledge is built on the discoveries of solitary genius scientists, rather than the collaborative efforts of many, says Cassidy Sugimoto, who studies gender disparities in science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Mehrabi’s winning paper, for example, about diversifying crops and animals on individual farms to improve biodiversity and costs, had 60 co-authors, involved hundreds of other researchers, and partnered with thousands of farmers. A solo-winner prize “pushes people towards a certain hierarchical division of labor, a certain competitiveness within teams, that doesn’t necessarily create the most robust systems of science,” she says. “We have to think about giving prizes to scientific teams rather than to the individual.” For his part, Mehrabi plans to use the prize money to expand this coalition to implement his paper’s climate solutions across the world.

Despite some of the criticism, Burgelman emphasizes that the current process is the best way to invest in climate science and planetary boundaries research. Previous winning projects have gone on to save 15 million hectares of the Amazonian forest, he notes, and have saved hundreds of thousands of lives from parasitic disease in Senegal. “What I am really looking forward to seeing, as the prize enters its fourth year, is the impact of the research that we have funded.”

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