Planetary Solutions: Top 10 Highlights of 2025

The YPS 5-Year Report celebrates and elevates the work being done by the Yale community to imagine, catalyze, and propel solutions to climate and sustainability challenges. By chronicling current and past work and highlighting a few of the innumerable efforts of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends over the past five years, the report demonstrates Yale’s positive contributions toward a healthier planet and thriving communities. Read the report.

The second year of Yale @ Climate Week NYC welcomed over 2,000 participants at events YPS hosted at The Yale Club of NYC and with collaborators across the city. Two dozen sessions led by faculty representing 16+ Yale schools, centers, and programs covered topics ranging from the arts to public health and law. A bipartisan panel of current and former U.S. representatives and senators packed the room on the opening night. 

Describing the kind of future we want to live in is the first step towards making it a reality. Working closely with city, state, and university leaders and gathering extensive community input, YPS is guiding the development of a shared and inspiring vision that will help shape the future of planetary solutions work on campus and beyond. A summit on October 10 gathered university and regional leaders to begin strategizing for the next 25 years.

YPS awarded 23 new grants totaling nearly $2M, bringing YPS grants awarded since 2022 to more than $7M and 89 projects. This year’s proposals offered research-driven solutions to global challenges through an impressive variety of technologies, partnerships, and practices. From ancient agriculture to cutting-edge AI, the funded proposals were selected from the most competitive applicant pool in the program’s history. Read about the projects and teams transforming knowledge into impact. 

The first-ever cohort to receive the Stella M. Hammond Planetary Solutions Fellowship consists of twelve students selected from an exceptionally competitive pool of applicants. The fellows receive a supplemental stipend and research funding as well as trainings in areas such as leadership, grants management, systems thinking, and more. 

The Sustainable Venture Prize, established in 2008, was relaunched by YPS as the Planetary Solutions Prize. The prize provides $50,000 in awards to two promising student-led, for-profit ventures dedicated to advancing environmental sustainability. Finalist teams with business ideas for a better world competed for the prize at Startup Yale, the university’s flagship student entrepreneurship competition. 

In partnership with Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, YPS launched Impact! Awards to provide support for dynamic teams of students, faculty, and staff and accelerate small-scale, “shovel-ready” projects. Now in its second year, YPS has distributed a total of six awards, totalling more than $100,000, and empowering students to engage in impact-focused programs.

In our new Sci X Sci-Fi program, YPS challenges thinkers across realms—futurists and scientists, artists and engineers—to envision a thriving, resilient future and to identify the kinds of knowledge that must be created, catalyzed, and implemented to get there. The series kicked off with a four-day visit by science fiction author and science writer Annalee Newitz, convening more than 240 people in both the Yale and New Haven communities. 

A new network of research institutions co-founded by Yale is recruiting U.S.-based researchers to contribute their expertise to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that assesses the latest science related to climate change. The U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC (USAA-IPCC) has already opened two calls for researchers who wish to be nominated to serve as experts, authors, and review editors for IPCC reports.

On October 22, YPS, Yale School of the Environment, and the Office of Sustainability brought students together to answer five critical questions posed by the Global Ethical Stocktake in advance of COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Reports from all over the world, like Yale’s, will be used to better connect climate agreements to the diverse daily lives of those who experience the climate crisis’s impact. On the ground in Belém, students, faculty, and alumni demonstrated Yale’s leadership and climate expertise at dozens of negotiations, panels, and workshops.