Living Seawalls – Royal Foundation Earthshot Prize Finalist
We are thrilled to announce that Living Seawalls, a flagship project of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS), led by a dynamic team of scientists from Macquarie University, UNSW Sydney, and SIMS, and with design expertise from Reef Design Lab has been selected as a finalist in the 2021 Royal Foundation’s Earthshot Prize.
The Earthshot Prize is the most ambitious and prestigious of its kind – designed to incentivise change and help to repair our planet over the next ten years.
Taking inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot which united millions of people around an organising goal to put man on the moon and catalysed the development of new technology in the 1960s, The Earthshot Prize is centred around five ‘Earthshots’ – simple but ambitious goals for our planet which, if achieved by 2030, will improve life for us all, for generations to come.
Revive our Oceans is one of those “Earthshots”.
Over the past six months, The Earthshot Prize, in collaboration with its Global Alliance network of over 200 Nominators, has been searching the world – from businesses to governments, grassroots initiatives and more – for solutions to these challenges and identifying a final set of astounding innovations from every corner of the globe.
As a project that lies at the intersection of ecology, design and engineering, Living Seawalls is a fabulous example of that innovation. Living Seawalls builds on the results of small-scale proof-of-concept experiments, conducted by the Green Engineering Working Group of the World Harbour Project, led by A/Prof Melanie Bishop and Prof Laura Airoldi.