In this exclusive interview conducted by Oke Peter, David Babson, Executive Vice President of Climate, Energy and Nature at XPRIZE, explains how innovation prizes are accelerating climate solutions, attracting private investment and advancing biodiversity monitoring. He highlights the success of XPRIZE Rainforest, which mobilised over $163 million in investment and demonstrated the commercial potential of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, environmental DNA and remote sensing. Babson also discusses Africa's opportunity to lead global climate innovation, the need to treat ecosystems as critical infrastructure, and how better measurement technologies can unlock sustainable development, conservation financing and long-term climate resilience.
What does the 27X return from XPRIZE Rainforest reveal about the value of innovation prizes?
The 27X return from XPRIZE Rainforest is consistent with what we have seen across other competitions: a prize purse can catalyze far more activity and investment than its initial philanthropic cost. Prizes focus global attention on a challenge, establish ambitious and objectively measurable performance standards, and create a credible process through which technologies can demonstrate what they can actually accomplish. That validation helps de-risk the capital that subsequently flows to participating teams. XPRIZE Rainforest challenged teams to transform biodiversity monitoring by making it faster,
more scalable, and more actionable. The competition helped mobilize more than $163 million in capital, generate 280 jobs, produce 237 active and pending patents, and support more than 75 conservation pilots across approximately 5 million hectares. Those outcomes show that prizes do more than reward a winning technology. They crowd in innovators, accelerate technical progress, validate performance under demanding conditions, and give investors, customers, policymakers, and other adopters greater confidence in the solutions that emerge. That is where much of the leverage comes from.
Has biodiversity monitoring reached a commercial tipping point?
XPRIZE Rainforest demonstrated that many of the technologies required for a commercial tipping point now exist. Teams advanced new combinations of artificial intelligence, environmental DNA, bioacoustics, drones, imaging, remote sensing, and field-based analytics that can generate biodiversity data much faster and at far greater scale than traditional approaches. The remaining barriers are not exclusively technical. Commercial adoption is still constrained by immature markets, inconsistent regulatory frameworks, and our limited ability to translate the value of healthy ecosystems into economic and financial decisions. The competition addressed the technical side of that equation. It showed that we can now
measure biodiversity and ecosystem performance with increasing speed, fidelity, and affordability. The next step is to develop policies, standards, procurement mechanisms, and markets that use that information. We are much closer to a commercial tipping point because the tools now exist. Reaching it will require greater creativity in how we value biodiversity, ecosystems, and ecosystem services.
•David Babson, Executive Vice President of Climate, Energy and Nature at XPRIZE,
How can African nations leverage rainforest technologies for sustainable development?
These technologies can provide African nations with lower-cost, higher-value data to support better and faster decisions about land use, conservation, infrastructure, agriculture, restoration, and economic development. Many African countries contain globally significant ecosystems but face practical limitations in monitoring them consistently across large and sometimes remote areas. Tools such as environmental DNA, bioacoustics, autonomous sensing, drones, remote sensing, and AI-enabled analysis can expand that capability without relying exclusively on costly and time-intensive field surveys. Better data can help governments and communities understand how ecosystems are changing, evaluate the results of conservation and restoration investments, improve protected-area management, and make more informed development decisions. It can also support stronger participation in carbon, biodiversity, natural-capital, and sustainable supply-chain markets where reliable measurement and verification are increasingly important. The real opportunity is to use these technologies not simply to observe nature, but to make ecosystem health and performance a more visible part of economic planning.
Can XPRIZE competitions create new industries faster than traditional funding models?
In many cases, yes. One reason is that an XPRIZE competition defines the outcome that must be achieved without prescribing which technology or approach must succeed. Traditional funding models often require funders to select technologies, institutions, or proposed solutions before there is sufficient evidence to know which will perform best. That creates an inherent risk of picking winners too early. A prize competition reverses that process. It creates a clear technical finish line, opens the challenge to a broad and diverse field, and rewards the teams that demonstrate the strongest results. XPRIZE Rainforest engaged more than 2,100 innovators from over 600 institutions across 60 countries. More than half of the participating teams were formed after the competition launched, indicating that the prize helped create new organizations rather than simply funding existing ones. The model is also a more direct connector to markets. Teams must demonstrate performance, often under rigorous real-world conditions, which creates evidence that investors, customers, partners, and policymakers can evaluate. That combination of open competition, objective validation, visibility, and market connection can accelerate the formation of an industry more efficiently than funding isolated technologies one at a time.
What is the biggest barrier to scaling climate technologies today?
One of the biggest barriers is market failure. We often do not adequately recognize or compensate the economic value created by climate technologies, conservation practices, and healthy ecosystems. That is especially true for biodiversity and ecosystem services. Forests, wetlands, soils, coral reefs, and other natural systems provide flood protection, water filtration, carbon storage, food security, climate resilience, and many other benefits. Yet these benefits are rarely measured or valued in the same way that we value conventional infrastructure. Technologies developed through XPRIZE Rainforest can help change that. By generating credible, quantifiable data about biodiversity and ecosystem performance, they can connect conservation outcomes to economic decisions, procurement, finance, insurance, supply chains, and emerging natural-capital markets. But technologies designed to support markets cannot scale if those markets do not exist or remain poorly structured. We need to change our thinking and begin treating ecosystems as critical infrastructure. Once their performance and value can be measured, we can create much stronger incentives to protect, restore, and improve them.
How can biodiversity projects attract more private investment?
Private investment follows evidence and confidence. Biodiversity projects must demonstrate not only that they produce ecological benefits, but that those benefits support measurable economic outcomes and can be maintained over time. The technologies advanced through XPRIZE Rainforest make that increasingly possible. Better sensing, monitoring, and verification can show whether a conservation or restoration project is improving biodiversity, strengthening ecosystem resilience, storing carbon, protecting water resources, or reducing risks to communities and businesses. That evidence can help de-risk investment by making performance more transparent and comparable. During the competition, teams mobilized more than $163 million in disclosed capital, while the number of unique investors involved grew from 16 to more than 100. As we become better at quantifying ecosystem performance, biodiversity projects can connect more credibly to carbon and natural-capital markets, regenerative agriculture, supply-chain commitments, insurance, public procurement, and other sources of demand. The objective is not simply to assign a price to nature. It is to make the substantial value that ecosystems already provide visible in the decisions that direct capital.
Which emerging technology will have the biggest climate impact this decade?
It is difficult to identify a single technology. The greatest impact will likely come from combinations of technologies that enable broader market and systems-level change. Measurement technologies will be especially important. AI, remote sensing, environmental DNA, advanced sensors, bioacoustics, robotics, and data platforms can generate quantifiable information that allows governments, companies, investors, and communities to make better decisions and determine whether climate and conservation interventions are actually working. These tools may not always be the intervention themselves, but they provide the evidence needed to guide investment, validate performance, improve strategies, and connect outcomes to markets. XPRIZE Rainforest demonstrated the value of this convergence. Teams combined multiple technologies into integrated systems capable of generating actionable biodiversity information at previously unattainable speeds and scales. The technologies with the greatest impact may therefore be those that allow many other climate and nature solutions to be evaluated, trusted, financed, and deployed more effectively.
What is the next major climate challenge XPRIZE aims to tackle?
Across XPRIZE’s Energy, Climate & Nature portfolio, we are pursuing an interconnected set of challenges rather than a single technology. In nature, our ambition is to build on XPRIZE Rainforest and expand the ability to measure, value, protect, and restore many different types of ecosystems. Rainforest focused primarily on rapid biodiversity assessment within one ecosystem type. Future competitions can address a broader range of ecosystems and a more comprehensive set of performance attributes, including biodiversity, resilience, carbon, water, and other ecosystem services. The long-term objective is to help establish the tools and technical standards needed to treat ecosystems as critical infrastructure—systems whose health, performance, and value can be measured and actively improved. In climate, we are exploring targeted approaches to slow warming, including solutions that address powerful greenhouse gases such as methane. In energy, we are working to advance abundant, affordable, clean energy because energy availability is an enabling condition for economic development and for many of the technologies needed to address global challenges. The common thread is the use of ambitious, measurable competitions to create new technical capabilities, validate them in the real world, and connect successful solutions to adoption and scale.
What role can African innovators play in advancing global climate solutions?
African innovators can play a defining role in global climate solutions by developing and deploying technologies that respond to real-world conditions across the continent while remaining relevant to markets worldwide. African countries encompass a tremendous range of ecosystems, energy systems, agricultural conditions, rapidly growing cities, and climate risks. That creates both an urgent need and a significant opportunity to develop solutions that are affordable, resilient, scalable, and effective in resource-constrained environments. The latest sensing, data, AI, energy, and environmental technologies can help innovators make better decisions more quickly, improve resource efficiency, and scale more sustainable practices. But African innovators should not be viewed only as adopters of technologies developed elsewhere. They can lead the design of solutions, business models, and deployment strategies that are locally grounded and globally applicable. Prize competitions can support that role by opening participation broadly, focusing on demonstrated outcomes rather than institutional pedigree, and giving high-performing teams access to international visibility, validation, partners, markets, and investment.
