World Solve

Commercial seaweed farming faces high initial equipment costs and fragile processing supply chains, delaying its potential for carbon sequestration.

Despite strict hygiene protocols, patients still frequently contract infections during hospital stays that they didn't have when they arrived. Closing this gap could save both lives and enormous healthcare costs.

Wages in many countries have grown more slowly than housing, healthcare, and food costs over the past few decades, steadily eroding real purchasing power. Reversing this trend remains a central unresolved economic challenge.

High childcare costs push many parents, disproportionately mothers, out of the workforce entirely or into reduced hours. Making quality childcare broadly affordable remains an unresolved economic and social policy gap.

Remittances sent to Indonesia from diaspora communities abroad are subject to high transfer fees, reducing the effective value delivered to recipient households who depend on this income.

Reusable rockets have cut costs, but they still require significant repair and inspection after each landing. True rapid reusability, like an airplane, would make space travel dramatically cheaper.

Data centers placed in unconventional locations to save on cooling costs still face risks from environmental changes or accidents that traditional facilities don't. Making these systems fully resilient remains an unresolved engineering challenge.

Solar panel efficiency has improved significantly, but in regions with less sunlight or higher installation costs, achieving full cost competitiveness with traditional energy remains inconsistent. Closing this gap universally remains an unresolved technical and economic challenge.

Wages in many cities haven't kept pace with housing costs, pushing homeownership and even renting out of reach for a growing share of workers. This is now a shared crisis across cities on almost every continent.

Rising demand keeps pushing housing costs higher in growing cities, pricing out the very workers those cities depend on. Making urban growth compatible with affordability remains an unresolved policy challenge nearly everywhere.

Farmers in India apply fertilizer without knowing their soil's actual nutrient profile because lab testing is too slow and expensive, resulting in both wasted input costs and degraded soil over time.

Fast-growing cities in Colombia regularly flood due to undersized or absent stormwater infrastructure, with retrofit costs far exceeding current municipal budgets.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for methods for quantifying the full social and environmental costs of different mobility systems 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 methods for quantifying the full environmental and social costs of different energy pathways 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.

Develop city-level data and economic models that quantify barriers in transport, housing, employment, education, and public services to guide investment.

Build accessible guidance systems that explain careers, prerequisites, costs, scholarships, apprenticeships, and labor-market realities to students without family networks.

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

Design affordable storage, logistics, grading, and processing systems that prevent fruit spoilage between small farms and markets without imposing high capital costs.

Affordable housing construction in Philippines is constrained by the high cost of imported cement and steel, while locally viable alternative materials remain underused due to lack of building code recognition.

Last-mile freight delivery in Egypt's congested cities remains dominated by diesel vehicles, and electric alternatives face high upfront costs and inadequate charging infrastructure.