Climate change is widely acknowledged as mankind’s most pressing challenge and what we do in the next few years will determine whether we can avoid serious impacts.

There’s an urgent need for new approaches, new products and services, to tackle climate change, and Forum for the Future has teamed up with The Financial Times and HP to unleash the power of innovation by launching a global competition.

The FT Climate Change Challenge will seek out and showcase the most exciting innovations - practical ideas which will reduce emissions and make us more resilient to the change ahead, and which can be developed, brought to market and scaled up to achieve maximum impact.

The winner, chosen by FT readers and an eminent panel of global business leaders, innovators and climate change experts, will receive a $75,000 prize – sponsored by HP - to help develop their product or service and bring it to market.

But all the best ideas will reach a global audience of business leaders through the pages and website of the FT, and in this way the competition aims to help a range of projects to attract the support they need to scale up and maximise their ability to tackle climate change.

What are we looking for?The competition aims to find the most promising innovations to tackle climate change. The winning entry could be a technical advance in reducing emissions or a social innovation helping individuals become more resilient to the local impacts of climate change.

We want ideas that will work. The key requirement is that the innovations will have moved off the drawing board and demonstrated their feasibility, but will not yet be commercially sucessful. They will have been piloted or prototyped and might have attracted seed financing or gained recognition locally. Entries must specify how they would use the prize money to develop and extend the product or service.

Innovations which have been developed by large companies or which already have major financial support will not be considered.

How will the winner be chosen?Forum For The Future will review all the entries and select the 12 most innovative and, promising ideas, which will be presented to our panel of judges:

• Lionel Barber
• Sir Richard Branson
• Eileen Claussen
• Mark Hurd
• Sir Terry Leahy
• Dr Rajendra K Pachauri
• Jonathon Porritt
• Leon Sandler

(Profiles of the judges can be accessed here)

This panel will select the five ideas which they feel can be developed and scaled up effectively to give the greatest contribution to tackling climate change. Each entry will be judged on a number of criteria including potential impact on climate change, originality, scalability and cost effectiveness.

Shortlisted entries will be presented to the FT’s global business audience and readers will vote to select the winner.

To apply online click here

To download a pdf of the application form, click here

Read more about this challenge in the FT here