An international team led by Edward Amoah, a Botstiber Scholar and graduate student in Penn State’s intercollegiate ecology program PlantVillage, was selected as one of 23 teams to receive a $100,000 XPRIZE Carbon Removal Student Award.
PlantVillage has also most recently been awarded an additional $1m XPRIZE for carbon capture work in Africa. The prize, funded by Elon Musk, will be used by the team to demonstrate their capacity to draw down one billion tons of carbon per year in a sound and economically attractive way that benefits low-income farmers in Africa.
PlantVillage was founded as a means for bringing the latest and best Penn State research expertise into the hands of struggling farmers. One critical aim is to make carbon credits publicly verifiable, with real-time monitoring. Another is to raise 200 million farmers out of poverty in Africa by developing a new income stream for them to be paid by customers seeking carbon credits on the global market. The overall vision for the project is to empower these farmers to collectively pull down a billion tons of carbon dioxide every year by planting and growing trackable trees on their land, helping not only themselves but the global community as well.
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