Environmental work is the rare category where a school student can produce something an adult would take seriously. The problems are local, the data is often public, and the competitions that judge the results are mostly free to enter and open to anyone, anywhere.
Jerome from Egypt is a good example of where that leads. He and a teammate noticed that factories produce most of the world's waste, so they built a machine that separates industrial waste from products and recycles it using sensors. They entered the science track of the GENIUS Olympiad, were judged across five rounds by a different judge each time, and came home with a bronze medal and a $15,000 scholarship.
Below are twelve ways in: nine competitions and three programs. Watch two things as you read. The first is how you enter, because a few of these need a teacher, a coach or a national organiser rather than just you. The second is the calendar, because four of them are open as you read this and one closes in under two weeks.
Competitions
The Earth Prize
The largest prize on this list and free to enter. Teams of up to five students born between 2007 and 2014 work through a structured blueprint that ends in a video pitch, and 35 teams are selected as Scholars and given one-to-one mentors before the field narrows to seven regional winners. Each regional winner receives $10,000, and the global winner is chosen by public vote. It has drawn 20,895 students from 169 countries and territories since 2022. Students can now form and submit a team without a teacher. Registration is open until January 10, 2027 and submissions close on January 31, 2027. It is run by the Earth Foundation, a Swiss NGO.
National Geographic Slingshot Challenge
The simplest brief here: one minute of video describing your solution to an environmental problem. Alone or in a team of up to six, ages 13 to 18, from any country in the world, free. Award recipients receive up to $10,000 as an unrestricted cash award, split evenly among team members, and there is a People's Choice award and an Explorer Connection award alongside it. Every entrant gets a digital certificate. The round opened on September 9 and closes on February 5, 2027, with recipients announced in May.
GENIUS Olympiad
Jerome's competition, and the one that treats the environment as a whole field rather than a topic. Nine disciplines, all framed environmentally: science, art, short film, music, robotics, entrepreneurship, speech, coding and artificial intelligence. Students in grades 8 to 12 apply directly online with no national fair in between, and finalists spend a week in Rochester, New York. It is the only paid entry on this list, at $75 per project plus $695 per participant for those invited to the finals, before travel, and no waivers are published. What makes it worth the money is on the other side: Rochester Institute of Technology offers renewable scholarships only to international students, worth $20,000 a year for gold down to $10,000 for finalists, if you are admitted there. Applications open in December, close March 1, 2027, and the finals run June 7 to 12. It is organised by Terra Science and Education and hosted by St. John Fisher University.
Blue Planet Awareness Contest
Bow Seat's contest, renamed this year from the Ocean Awareness Contest, and the one to enter if your strength is creative rather than technical. Seven categories cover visual art by hand or digital, poetry and spoken word, creative writing, film, music and dance, and interactive media. The 2027 theme is "Nature of Truth: Environmentalism in an Age of Disinformation." It is free, open to students aged 11 to 18 worldwide in junior and senior divisions, and prizes run from $1,000 for gold down to $50. You need an adult sponsor, which can be a parent or a mentor rather than a school. The deadline is June 7, 2027. Note that a few of the extra prizes are limited to students in the United States.
Science Without Borders Challenge
An ocean art competition run by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, free, for students aged 11 to 19 anywhere. You submit one original two-dimensional artwork made by hand, a painting or a drawing, plus two photographs of yourself making it. The 2027 theme is "Navigate with Care," on how mariners can protect people and ocean life. Prizes in each age group run $500, $350 and $200, with a $50 People's Choice scholarship. The deadline is March 1, 2027.
World of 8 Billion Student Video Contest
Sixty seconds of video connecting human population growth to one global topic and proposing a sustainable solution. The 2026-27 topics are fresh water use, extreme weather and city planning. Free, open to students in grades 6 to 12 or the international equivalent anywhere in the world, with more than $10,000 in prizes and separate international honours by world region. Two practical notes for students outside the United States: you need a parent or guardian consent form, and a video not in English needs English subtitles. It opened on September 2 and entries are due March 3, 2027.
Project Green Challenge
Thirty days, thirty challenges, one released each morning and live for 24 hours, with photos, video and writing submitted for points. Free, run by the nonprofit Turning Green, and it has engaged over 350,000 students since 2011. Top scorers apply for the finals, where up to 14 finalists from the global pool present a climate action project and a champion takes a cash prize. It runs October 1 to 30, 2026, so this is the one to register for this week, with finals held virtually on November 21 and 22. The rules page posted on the site is badly out of date and restricts some daily prizes to students in the United States, while international students clearly reach the finals, so treat the daily prizes as the uncertain part.
The Iris Prize
Not a contest so much as a grant for work already underway. Three tiers: a $5,000 Seed Prize for an idea, ages 14 to 24, a $10,000 Stem Prize for a small recent project, and a $15,000 Iris Prize for an established one that could scale, both for ages 16 to 24. Applications are accepted in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Arabic, and the project must be led by young people with genuine decision-making power. Applications for 2027 open March 1 and close April 8. One thing to plan for: if you are a minor in your country, you need a local organisation or NGO to act as fiscal sponsor and hold the grant.
Stockholm Junior Water Prize
The most prestigious water science award for school students, for a research project using proper experimental methods, written up in English in at most twenty pages. Ages 15 to 20, with national finals between January and June and the international final in Stockholm at the end of August. Tens of thousands of students take part across about 40 countries. Here is the catch, and it is the most important one in this post: only projects nominated by a national organiser can compete internationally, and if your country does not have one, the organisers publish no other way in. Check the map of national organisers before you build your year around it.
Programs
AFS Global STEM Accelerators
Twelve weeks online, three to four hours a week, for young women aged 15 to 17 and a half, built around STEM and sustainability. Scholars build prototypes and a social impact project, present it to the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Social Impact Strategy, which co-developed the curriculum, and earn a certificate in global competence. AFS awards 300 full scholarships and the programme is available only by scholarship, so there is nothing to pay. Applications for the 2026 cohort ran February to April; watch for the 2027 cycle to open on a similar schedule.
FXB Climate Advocates
Free, fully virtual, four months, for anyone aged 13 to 25, at about two hours a week. You learn from sessions taught by experts from organisations including Project Drawdown, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and Harvard's FXB Center, then design and run a climate action project in your own community, which gets showcased at climate convenings. The programme itself does not fund your project. It is run by FXB USA, and cohorts have run in English, French and Spanish. The autumn 2026 deadline passed on September 15, so this is one to watch for the next cohort.
True Blue Fellowship
Bow Seat's fellowship funds twelve young people worldwide with up to $2,500 each, plus mentorship and monthly cohort meetings, to run a year-long project that uses the creative arts to protect the ocean, waterways or the climate. It is for ages 16 to 24 at the start of the fellowship in January, and the project should be new or under two years old. Applications for 2027 are closed and the next cycle opens in June 2027, which is enough time to start the project first and apply with something already moving.
Start your own journey
Four of these are open right now. Project Green Challenge starts on October 1, which is under two weeks away. The Earth Prize closes on January 31, the Slingshot Challenge on February 5, and the GENIUS Olympiad on March 1.
Kai, the Borderless AI college counselor, checks which of these your age and country qualify you for, turns each deadline into a task, and helps you turn a project into an application an admissions reader can follow. It is free to use.
Start with Kai, and read the stories from students who did it.
