The lifelong Nike exec fighting climate change with Prince William

Hannah Jones had been working for Nike for 22 years when she saw an advert in The Economist that piqued her interest.

“It said, ‘CEO of The Earthshot Prize’ and I thought, huh, that’s interesting, I’ve never heard of that,” she revealed recently.

“And then I read a bit more and found out that it was a new idea.”

On discovering the scale of the project, not to mention the ambition of its founder, the Prince of Wales, she wasted little time in signing up and relocating from the US to London.

Three and a half years later, Ms Jones, a mother-of-two, could not be more passionate about the task at hand: solving the climate crisis, one solution at a time.

From a solar-powered ironing cart in India to antelope conservation in Kazakhstan, she is hell-bent on creating lasting change, a change that will shape the Prince’s legacy.

Almost halfway through the ten-year project, Earthshot is now sitting on a database of some 3,800 nominations, a vast international pool of environmental initiatives that she hopes might one day become a green Google – a searchable database of solutions.

If nothing else, she recognises, “that is a public good in and of itself”. But Ms Jones’s ambition stretches far beyond global search engines. This is about saving the planet.

Born in Brighton and raised in Brussels, she has long displayed the qualities needed for the job.

In 2007, she was named a Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum and in 2010 was ranked in the top ten of Fast Company’s Most Creative People.

Having started her career nearly 35 years ago running social action campaigns for BBC Radio 1, she learnt from the get-go how to create a credible call to action.

From there, she moved on to running public service campaigns about HIV/AIDS at radio stations across Europe before helping Microsoft build its first-ever philanthropy programme, which provided training for unemployed people across Europe.

At Nike, Ms Jones began as director of corporate responsibility, running its labour rights, environmental and community affairs functions across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Six years later, she was vice president of that department, a role that included oversight of the company’s sustainability strategy.

The move ensured Ms Jones was fluent in the language that has come to epitomise the Earthshot Prize – innovation, collaboration, scaling solutions – many years before the idea for the project was formed. Meanwhile, the newlywed Prince was still flying helicopters in Anglesey.

Ms Jones was promoted to the role of chief sustainability officer and later founded Nike Valiant Labs, building and piloting new businesses.

It was the perfect grounding for her next step. She took on the challenge of fixing the world’s climate by 2030, propelled forward by the man who would soon become heir to the throne, a man who is as determined to change the course of climate change.

It’s a heady mix but one that Ms Jones is more than capable of navigating.

In her, the Prince has found an advocate so genuinely enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Earthshot’s ambition that when she is on the subject, it is difficult to get a word in edgeways.

As she prepared for the fourth annual Earthshot Award ceremony, which will take place in Cape Town on Nov 6, Ms Jones enthused about the exponential increase in nominations flooding in from all corners of the globe.

This year’s finalists have been whittled down from more than 2,400 nominations, double that of the previous year.

As the event will be the first to be held in Africa, a huge effort went into scouting solutions from across the continent.

As well as increasing the numbers of official nominators, people and organisations who have “tentacles and networks” in specific areas, Earthshot has also begun dipping its toe into the world of artificial intelligence, using technology to scour the internet.

“We’re beginning to think about the role of technology in helping create additional search functions,” Ms Jones reveals.

“How can our data provide insights and trends and analytics and pictures? We are definitely figuring out that’s a longer-term play.”

Efforts to whip up interest in Africa were seemingly successful. Around a third of the total nominations this year were from either African-based initiatives or those working in the continent.

“We have a lot to learn from Africa,” Ms Jones says. “The innovation that we’re seeing there is about creating green jobs and green prosperity and green livelihoods.

“It is not just solving a climate issue, it’s solving a job and a sustainable livelihoods issue, and they are doing some incredible work. A lot of it is youth-led and very entrepreneurial.”

She says the nominations “tell a story” about an innovation movement taking place across Africa that has yet to take hold in the global north.

It is a movement fuelled by necessity, she notes, whether that be food waste caused by climate change, a lack of electricity, landfill sites piled high with textiles caused by fashion waste, or simply, a lack of electricity and water.

Young people, Ms Jones says, not only recognise that they are “sitting next to a problem” but that they could “actually fix that problem and turn it into an opportunity.”

After an action-packed week in Cape Town, which will focus not only on the latest cohort of Earthshot finalists but also efforts to tackle climate change across Africa, the focus will shift to the next location.

The awards are likely to be held next year in South America and a similar push will go into ensuring that the Earthshot message is relayed loudly across that continent too.

But Ms Jones and the Prince have no intention of packing up and leaving Africa without a backward glance.

Their message next week will be one of long-term support, of creating a legacy that extends well beyond one particular awards show.

Eventually, Ms Jones aims to have touched every corner of the globe, with small, yet ingenious ideas for saving the planet being scaled up and expanded as far as she can reach.

Turning the seemingly impossible into the possible is what Earthshot is all about. “With a bit of grit and collaboration, we can do anything we want,” she says.