Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) has awarded a new cohort of grants for collaborative projects aimed at solving global climate, biodiversity, and related societal challenges.This year, YPS — a campus-wide initiative that unites leaders and experts from across Yale, and bridges academic expertise with university operations — will award more than $1.9 million in grants to 19 projects. Six departments in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (and all three FAS divisions), as well as eight of Yale’s professional schools, are represented among the grantees. The grants support novel and impactful projects that solve planetary challenges. Since 2022, YPS has awarded more than $9 million to 108 projects across the university.“The challenges facing people and the planet are urgent, complex, and unlike anything we have faced before. Yet the ambition and creativity of the Yale community continue to rise to meet them,” said Julie Zimmerman, vice provost for planetary solutions. “Through interdisciplinary collaboration and bold new ideas, projects supported by the YPS Grant Program are turning discovery into action and accelerating solutions with real potential to address climate change, restore ecosystems, and improve lives in New Haven and around the world.”New this year, the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator (PSIA), recently launched by YPS and Yale Ventures, will provide expert mentorship and investor/partner connections to commercialization-focused projects. The PSIA aims to support the translation of bold ideas into scalable innovations that mitigate climate change and address other planetary challenges. Four of this year’s proposed projects were selected to participate in the PSIA. In all, this year’s awards include four Initiation Grants (up to $25,000), which are intended to spark new ideas; 10 Exploration Grants (up to $100,000), which help lay the groundwork for implementation of ideas; and five Constellation Grants (up to $250,000 over two years), which aim to transform knowledge into action, including through commercialization. Dozens of reviewers — faculty, staff, and external experts – were involved in selecting this year’s funded projects. These grants will support the work of 28 faculty members (including 13 junior faculty), eight postdocs, 14 graduate students, and four undergraduate students. The four projects receiving Constellation Grants that will be supported through the PSIA are: a project co-led by Benjamin Chan, a research scientist in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, that will test a disease control approach using bacteriophages (naturally occurring viruses of bacteria) to selectively suppress the bacteria that cause disease outbreaks in shrimp farms in Ecuador;a collaboration between John Fortner from the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (Yale Engineering), James Mayer from the Department of Chemistry, and Krystal Pollitt from Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) that uses catalytic technology to develop a new method to destroy synthetic organic compounds widely used in industrial applications and firefighting foams that pose environmental and public health threats;a multidisciplinary effort (which includes Alan Organschi, Hakim Hasan, and Phillip Bernstein from Yale School of Architecture; Barbara Reck and Joseph Orefice from YSE; Liangbing Hu from Yale Engineering; and Oswaldo Chinchilla from the Department of Anthropology) that will use robotically fabricated mass timber components in building projects; anda project (involving Noah Planavsky from the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, John Fortner from Yale Engineering, Krystal Pollitt from YSPH, and Jake Thompson from Earth & Planetary Sciences) that aims to integrate carbon dioxide removal directly into PFAS cleanup, enabling large-scale, cost-effective restoration of contaminated agricultural land.“This year we are thrilled to launch the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator, bringing Yale Ventures’ infrastructure to bear with milestone-based funding, expert mentorship, and connections to the investors and partners that can translate promising technologies to market,” said Josh Geballe, managing director of Yale Ventures. “We look forward to working with this first cohort of awardees to refine and scale up these Yale innovations to deliver global impact.”A fifth Constellation Grant will go to a Yale School of the Environment (YSE) project that seeks to better understand how naturally regenerating seedlings can be harnessed to better meet tropical forest restoration goals. Working with Ponterra (a commercial developer of high-quality carbon projects that operates a large-scale restoration project in Panama), the team will study which landscape conditions enable natural generation to reliably create carbon and biodiversity outcomes. Co-principal investigators include Liza Comita, the Davis-Denkmann Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology at YSE; and Jacob Slusser and Eva Garen from the YSE-based Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative.Other new grants will help Yale scholars and researchers address an array of planetary challenges by:investigating the effects and consequences of ocean acidification in Long Island Sound;exploring how extreme weather events are affecting Indigenous livelihoods in southeast Amazonia and possible solutions;creating a new interdisciplinary platform for nursing-centered climate and health action;helping New Haven students interpret local air quality data through creative practice;developing an economic framework that analyzes the impacts of water infrastructure on human welfare and economic growth worldwide;identifying the kinds of managerial practices and organizational structures that allow firms to maintain a “beyond-profit” purpose; andleveraging remote sensors and models to support freshwater biodiversity monitoring and management in Connecticut and elsewhere in the U.S.Read more about each of the 2026 grant recipients, and learn about the program’s generous donors, on the YPS website. The Three Cairns Climate Impact Innovation Fund played a foundational role in establishing the YPS Grant Program, providing consistent funding and leadership that has catalyzed further donor support.“Through the Yale Planetary Solutions Grant Program, we are pairing Yale’s long-standing leadership in environmental scholarship with a deliberately interdisciplinary model that accelerates real-world impact,” said Scott Strobel, Yale’s provost. “These grants support faculty, students, staff, and community partners in collaborations spanning the sciences, engineering, health, policy, and the humanities. “They provide early-stage support for promising ideas and build the evidence and momentum needed to scale what works.”Learn more about the YPS Grant Program and the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator.