World Solve

Develop methods to quantify livelihoods, health, culture, land, and social losses caused by drought, salinization, erosion, and chronic heat.

Create water, waste, energy, land-use, and visitor-management systems that support residents as climate stress and seasonal tourism intensify.

Develop land-use, compensation, farming, and hydrological strategies that allow rivers to absorb floods without simply eliminating rural livelihoods.

Create affordable slope monitoring, drainage, building standards, relocation alternatives, and community warning systems for rapidly growing hillside settlements.

Develop localized alerting systems that account for terrain, landslides, poor connectivity, and short warning windows in remote mountainous settlements.

Design legal and social systems for relocating communities exposed to erosion, flooding, drought, or sea-level rise while preserving rights, livelihoods, and identity.

Create transition plans for towns dependent on coal jobs, tax revenue, rail infrastructure, and related industries as plants and mines close.

Develop storage approaches that shift renewable energy across weeks or months rather than only across hours, without prohibitive material or infrastructure costs.

Develop credible worker-centered systems that identify recruitment abuse, debt bondage, and wage theft in supply chains that currently rely on superficial audits.

Map and govern seasonal livestock routes so roads, farms, conservation zones, and private enclosures do not trigger conflict or livestock losses.

Design cooperative, rental, robotic, or service-based machinery systems suitable for farms too small to justify individual equipment ownership.

Develop restoration models that reduce emissions and fire risk while providing viable incomes for communities dependent on drained peatland agriculture.

Identify and preserve the habitats, flowering cycles, and landscape corridors needed to sustain native pollinators amid expanding roads, housing, and monoculture farming.

Registering a new business in Germany often requires navigating multiple disconnected agencies with redundant paperwork, discouraging formalization of small enterprises.

Current approaches to pathways for achieving high levels of circularity in the plastics and packaging sectors either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

Manufacturers in Poland largely dispose of byproducts that could be inputs for other industries, but there is no matchmaking infrastructure connecting waste streams to potential users.

Despite recognition of its importance, reliable methods for passive cooling and ventilation systems for informal settlement housing are still lacking. Progress is hindered by incomplete mechanistic knowledge, high capital and operational barriers, and the absence of deployment models suited to the contexts of greatest need.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for autonomous microgravity assembly of large habitats and infrastructure creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

Current approaches to higher-order assessments valid under unrestricted AI tool access either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

A persistent gap exists in realizing practical, scalable solutions for technologies for the continuous monitoring and verification of methane emissions from multiple sectors. Scientific understanding, engineering readiness and institutional capacity remain insufficient to translate promising concepts into durable impact under real-world constraints of cost, skills and governance.