World Solve

Metropolises like Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila are sinking faster than global sea levels are rising. Engineering solutions like sea walls only buy time while urban land-use policies fail to stop illegal extraction.

Digital platforms and assistive devices remain cost-prohibitive or unadapted for regional languages, excluding millions of persons with disabilities from the growing digital workforce.

Aging urban populations face housing options designed for traditional multi-generational families rather than accessible, assisted independent living.

Smallholder farmers growing organic cash crops face export rejections because synthetic chemicals spray-drift from neighboring non-organic farms.

Small towns burn household plastic and trash daily, generating toxic dioxin emissions that contaminate nearby air and local farmland.

Current malaria prevention still depends heavily on physical barriers and insecticides, both of which face growing resistance and logistical challenges in the regions most affected. A more durable prevention method remains an urgent unmet need.

As AI-generated images, videos, and text become easier to produce, election laws in most places haven't caught up with rules for disclosure or restriction. This leaves a rapidly growing campaign tactic largely unregulated.

Zoning, housing, and infrastructure decisions are sometimes controlled by higher levels of government that move far slower than the pace of local growth. This mismatch leaves cities struggling to manage problems they can see coming but can't legally address.

False claims about candidates or voting processes can spread across social media faster than officials can issue corrections, especially close to election day. This growing speed gap threatens the integrity of public understanding during critical voting periods.

Some slow-growing cancers are unlikely to ever threaten a patient's life, yet current diagnostics often can't tell them apart from dangerous ones. This leads to both overtreatment and, at times, dangerous undertreatment.

Microplastics have been found nearly everywhere scientists have looked, including soil and tap water, yet no affordable removal method exists at scale. This leaves an existing, growing contamination problem largely unaddressed.

Thousands of dead satellites and fragments now circle the planet, and a single collision can create thousands more pieces of debris. Left unmanaged, this could eventually make some orbits too dangerous to use safely.

New, fast-growing markets often attract inexperienced investors right before major price crashes, leading to significant personal financial losses. Protecting newer investors without stifling innovation remains an unresolved balance.

Growing political division in many countries is making even routine governance decisions slower and more contentious than in the past. Rebuilding functional cooperation across political divides remains an unresolved societal challenge.

Food allergy rates have been rising for decades, and the exact reasons behind this trend remain only partially understood. Understanding the cause could help prevent, not just manage, this growing health issue.

Artificial lighting confuses migration patterns, hunting behavior, and reproduction cycles in many nocturnal species, yet city lighting keeps expanding with growth. A widely adopted, wildlife-friendly lighting standard remains missing.

If moral status depends on capacities like reasoning or suffering rather than being human specifically, then sufficiently advanced machines or aliens could theoretically deserve equal consideration. This unresolved question has growing relevance as artificial intelligence advances.

Wild animals experience enormous suffering from disease, starvation, and predation, and it's unclear whether humans have any duty to intervene, given the massive scale and complexity involved. This unresolved question is a growing but underexplored area of ethics.

Some fish populations have been fished to the point of collapse, and even with strict conservation measures, recovery can take decades longer than demand is willing to wait. Balancing recovery with continued food needs remains unresolved.

Wind turbine blades and other renewable energy components can be difficult and costly to recycle, creating a growing waste stream from an industry meant to be environmentally beneficial. Closing this lifecycle gap remains an unresolved sustainability challenge.