The RELX ​Group ​Environmental ​Challenge 2018 ​is now open for applications

Girl drinking water

Each year the RELX Group Environmental Challenge is awarded to projects that best demonstrate how they can provide sustainable access to safe water or sanitation.  There is a $50,000 prize for the first place entry and a $25,000 prize for the second place entry.  The winners also receive free access for one year to ScienceDirect, our Scientific, Technical & Medical business’ database of full text, scientific information, including almost 250,000 articles since 2000 in Environmental Sciences.

Projects must have clear practical applicability, address identified need and advance related issues such as health, education, or human rights.

About the challenge

The RELX Group Environmental Challenge is open to individuals or organisations operating in the not-for-profit and for-profit sectors. Projects must advance sustainable access to safe water where it is presently at risk and/or access to improved sanitation, and include the following criteria:

  • Be replicable, scalable and sustainable. and set a benchmark for innovation
  • Have practical applicability
  • Address non-discrimination/equity of access
  • Involve and impact a range of stakeholders
  • Have local/community-level engagement

These are the criteria against which projects will be assessed. Early stage projects are preferred. The winning project in the RELX Group Environmental Challenge will receive a single payment of $50,000, with the second place finisher receiving a single payment of $25,000.

All applicants will be offered access to relevant RELX Group products, such as Water Research, that can help in the preparation of their submissions. All applicants will be offered access to LexisNexis Risk Solution’s open source high performance computing (HPCC) resource, to allow them to process large amounts of research data. Documentation, tools, code examples and online training courses in HPCC and ECL, the programming language used by the HPCC Systems platform, will also be available to those applicants that may need them. Winning projects will be highlighted in Water Research.  Find out more about RELX Group Environmental Challenge or get in touch at environmental.challenge@relx.com.

Applications close on May 14th 2018, register and apply today here.

Last year’s first prize winner, eWater uses mobile and contactless payment technology for accountable revenue collection and data management to sustain urban and rural water systems throughout the developing world. Watch videos about previous winners here.