Rapid construction is consuming parks and open land, reducing residents' access to recreation and worsening urban heat. Green-corridor urban planning policies could preserve livability as cities expand.
Repository of problems worth solving
World Solve is a public institutional repository for identifying real unresolved problems across science, society, health, governance, economics, and local systems. Each entry is intended to be citable, inspectable, and actionable.
Urban food security is increasingly at risk in land-scarce Asian city-states and dense metros.
Limited agricultural land near dense cities increases reliance on imports, raising vulnerability to supply disruptions. Vertical farming and urban agriculture ventures could improve local food resilience.
Small island and coastal communities in Southeast Asia face growing climate displacement risk.
Rising seas and stronger storms threaten to permanently displace communities that have lived in coastal areas for generations. Managed relocation planning and resilient livelihood diversification programs are urgently needed.
Land tenure insecurity discourages long-term farm investment.
Many farmers, especially women, lack formal land titles, making it risky to invest in irrigation or trees. Digital land registries using satellite mapping could formalize ownership quickly and cheaply.
Desertification is expanding across the Sahel, displacing millions.
Overgrazing, deforestation, and reduced rainfall are turning arable land into desert, forcing migration and fueling conflict. Large-scale reforestation efforts like the Great Green Wall need faster, better-funded implementation.
Coastal erosion and rising seas threaten major African cities and infrastructure.
Cities like Lagos, Accra, and Dakar are losing land to erosion, threatening homes and economic infrastructure. Nature-based coastal defenses like mangrove restoration are cost-effective but underutilized.
Women's land ownership rates remain far lower than men's across most African countries.
Customary laws and inheritance practices frequently exclude women from owning the land they farm. Legal-aid apps and digital land-title registries designed for women could improve equity.
Cattle rustling and farmer-herder clashes are a growing source of rural violence.
Competition over shrinking grazing land and water is turning traditional rivalries deadly in several regions. Conflict-early-warning systems and shared resource-management agreements could ease tensions.
Autonomous real-time landing on rugged, unstructured planetary terrain remains high risk.
Landers currently depend on pre-mapped terrain, which leaves them vulnerable to boulders, unexpected slopes, and dust plumes during touchdown. Ultra-fast optical-LiDAR terrain-relative navigation is needed for safe pinpoint landing.
We lack ultra-sensitive, miniaturized instruments to detect low concentrations of bio-organic molecules.
Robotic planetary landers are restricted by payload weight and power, making complex lab chemistry difficult on site. Micro-fluidic lab-on-a-chip biosensors are required to analyze Martian or icy moon soil in-situ.
Atmospheric entry heat shields for massive payloads on Mars and Venus are too heavy.
Rigid aeroshells are constrained by rocket fairing diameters, limiting landed mass to around 1-2 metric tons. Deployable or inflatable aerodynamic decelerators are needed to land heavy human habitats safely.
High-density planetary atmospheric entry prediction is inaccurate due to variable upper-atmosphere density.
Martian dust storms and atmospheric tides cause rapid density shifts that alter entry trajectories and threaten landers. Real-time satellite atmosphere sensing and adaptive guidance systems are needed.
Planetary protection protocols hinder robotic exploration of potential liquid water zones on Mars.
Sterilization requirements to avoid contaminating Mars with Earth microbes make landers exceptionally expensive and slow to build. Advanced bio-decontamination standards and rapid cleanroom testing methods are required.
Venus atmospheric probes fail within hours due to extreme surface heat and corrosive sulfuric acid.
Surface landers face pressures of 90 atmospheres and temperatures near 460°C, melting silicon microelectronics. High-temperature silicon carbide electronics and mechanical computing landers are required.
We lack precise knowledge of the mechanical strength and internal cohesion of small asteroids.
Asteroids range from solid iron rocks to loose rubble piles, making landing or kinetic deflection unpredictable. In-situ seismic characterization and robotic surface sampling missions are needed across asteroid types.
Sub-orbital hypersonic passenger vehicles cause extreme noise pollution and sonic booms over land.
Commercial point-to-point rocket or scramjet transit is limited to ocean routes due to severe atmospheric shockwaves. Low-boom aerodynamic shaping and active acoustic damping technologies must be developed.
We haven't created modular infrastructure capable of withstanding compound disaster hazards in Pacific-Asian archipelagos.
Bridges, ports, and power stations across island nations are built with conventional standards that fail during combined seismic events, storm surges, and landslides, cutting off entire island populations from emergency relief.
We haven't built equitable semiconductor supply chains that distribute technical value-add to developing Asian economies.
While advanced manufacturing is concentrated in East Asia, neighboring developing economies remain trapped in low-margin raw material extraction and low-skilled assembly without technology transfer or capacity building.
We haven't resolved land tenure insecurity for indigenous and tribal minority communities across Southeast Asia.
Indigenous peoples routinely lack formal land titles to ancestral territories, leading to forced displacement and loss of livelihoods when lands are designated for industrial agriculture, mining, or forestry concessions.
We haven't halted the physical land subsidence caused by groundwater over-extraction in rapidly growing coastal cities.
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.