Amid a climate rollback, these 19 projects are keeping the earth’s future in focus

In 2026, it can feel like we are at an inflection point in the fight against climate change—and not necessarily in a positive way. In the U.S., the government is focused on deregulating industries like oil and gas while actively disinvesting in renewable energy. In the private sector, the AI race is focused on building larger (read: more resource-intensive) data centers. But even as climate change disappears from corporate websites and the federal government’s list of priorities, there are companies and organizations keeping the fight alive—and bringing true innovation to it. These World Changing Ideas honorees are all thinking about how we can be better stewards of the earth. Their efforts run the gamut. Circular Solutions is devising ways to track recycling efficacy, Musa is showing that new developments can exist with the environment in mind, and Sceye is rethinking how wildfires are detected. And those are just a few of the projects below with a genuine commitment to earth stewardship. Winners A Solution for Land-Based Oil Spills, VMLRead more about how VML worked with the University of the Andes and outdoor apparel brand Atratus to explore a potential way to remediate oil spills on land. Agentic AI for food and agriculture, Cropin Technology SolutionsCropin, an India-based AI platform for global food and agriculture, has been building AI innovations since 2015 to help power models to understand crop behavior, environmental variability, and global farming systems. The company maintains what it says is the world’s largest structured repository of agricultural intelligence, covering 400 crops and more than 10,000 varieties across 103 countries, allowing for hyper-local predictions about agricultural performance. In 2024, Cropin launched an enterprise-grade GenAI platform for food and agriculture that offers yield forecasting, climate-risk intelligence, disease detection, and supply-chain planning to help farmers make smarter decisions about their farms. Circ