The Challenge

What is the Climate Investment Challenge?

The CIC is a global competition inviting postgraduate students to tackle real-world climate investment challenges through the lenses of innovative financing mechanisms and climate analytics.

Participants develop and pitch rigorous, creative solutions that help mobilise capital, improve investment decision-making, or increase the effectiveness of climate-related investments across sectors, markets, and regions.

Why participate?

Move beyond theory to design solutions which could move the dial on climate investment.

Whether it’s structuring a new financing mechanism or building a data-driven analytical tool, your solution could win a cash prize to support its development and scale. Winning teams also gain access Imperial College’s climate finance network for accelerator opportunities and potential institutional partnerships.

All participants gain valuable experience, visibility, and insight into what it takes to turn strong ideas into implementable climate solutions.

Regardless of where you’re based, the CIC is uniquely global and welcomes applications from around the world.

Ready to challenge yourself?

Apply

In our 7th year, we’re growing our focus

In recognition of the growing need for robust and data-driven tools and metrics to support climate-aware investment, we have introduced a new prize track to our 2026 Challenge.

The Climate Analytics prize is an exciting new pathway for students across disciplines to engage with challenges to climate-aware investment.

Our prizes

Innovative Financing Mechanisms

This prize looks for innovative financing mechanisms which can deploy capital at scale to tackle climate challenges.
From a novel blended finance mechanism to scale renewable energy investment, to a climate-focused outcome bond which balances returns with impact, and everything in between, this prize aims to support structures which unlock capital to support climate positive outcomes.

Discover a previous winner
Climate Analytics *New*

Our new prize track recognises that climate investment must be grounded in robust, data-driven insights. This prize looks for novel tools and risk metrics which can resolve challenges in climate-aware investment across public and private markets.
Whether it’s a novel greenwashing indicator, or an AI-enabled model to analyse nature risk at the asset-level, we welcome tools and metrics which work to improve investment decision-making for climate-aware investing.

The process

The CIC follows three stages.

Each team completes a Concept Note using the provided template for the prize your team is applying to.
Read our Evaluation page to make sure you’re on the right track.
Only one team member should submit the Concept Note on behalf of the team.
16 teams are selected as semi-finalists.
Semi-finalists develop a 10-slide Business Case Deck describing their solution in depth.
A group of experts will select 8 finalists, 4 for each prize track.
Finalists are invited to pitch their solution to a panel of expert judges at our flagship final event, held in the heart of London.
The event accommodates hybrid presentations to support teams who are near or far.

Key dates

CIC opens for submissions - 16th January 2026
Concept Note deadline - 9:00am UKT, 16th March 2026
Business Case Deck deadline - 27th April 2026
Final event - 11th June 2026

Eligibility

- The CIC is open to postgraduate students worldwide.
- Teams consist of 2-6 members, with at least one member being a postgraduate student enrolled in an MSc, MBA, PhD programme, or equivalent.
- Teams can consist of members from the same university or a variety of universities.
- Solutions must be original to those in the team (i.e., you cannot pitch a solution which a company or platform has already developed).