The Royal Academy of Engineering has launched its new Green Future Fellowships. It will award £150 million over the next five years to 50 of the best ideas and scalable technologies essential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for adapting to the impacts of climate change.

The Green Future Fellowships will provide innovators, scientists, researchers and engineers with the funding, capacity and tailored support to transform their cutting-edge ideas and existing initiatives into scalable, commercially viable, engineering solutions to secure a greener, fairer future.

At least 50 fellows (ten a year for five years) will receive up to £3 million each to develop and scale their ideas for up to a decade. These climate tech solutions should contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and help society adapt to the impacts of climate change.

In a new survey of 2,000 adults conducted by Opinium on behalf of the Royal Academy of Engineering, nearly two thirds (64%) of respondents say that more needs to be done to scale existing solutions to the climate crisis. It found that 7 in 10 people surveyed believe that engineers are essential for developing solutions that will help us adapt to living with the effects of climate change and preventing greenhouse gas emissions. Almost two thirds (63%) said that the UK needs more people to become engineers to tackle the climate crisis.

Three areas where the public believe the biggest impact can be made are the generation of a constant supply of electricity without burning fossil fuels; recycling and reusing metals and plastics more efficiently so that less energy is needed, and recovering and using energy that would otherwise be wasted (such as using waste heat from industrial processes).