World Solve

Lake Victoria and other water bodies suffer from algal blooms and declining fish stocks due to unregulated pollution. Affordable water-quality sensors could enable community-led monitoring and enforcement.

Aging pipe networks and poor maintenance waste water that cities desperately need. Leak-detection sensor startups and IoT-based monitoring could recover significant volumes.

Logging, charcoal production, and agricultural expansion are destroying rainforest that regulates regional and global climate. Community-based forest monitoring using satellite and drone imagery could help enforce protections.

Weak institutions, resource competition, and ethnic tensions continue to trigger instability, displacing millions. Early-warning conflict-monitoring platforms using open-source data could support faster diplomatic intervention.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for solutions for safe long-term storage and monitoring of captured carbon dioxide 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.

3D-printing complex structural metal components in microgravity often results in porosity and micro-cracks. We need reliable thermal controls and melt-pool monitoring for zero-g metal and composite fabrication.

Variable space weather causes unpredictable upper atmosphere expansion, creating atmospheric drag that alters satellite orbits without warning. Space situational awareness requires real-time upper-atmosphere mapping.

Up to 30% of rural water hand-pumps and piped schemes break within two years of installation and remain broken due to missing spare parts supply chains.

Current wearables track surface-level signals like heart rate well, but measuring things like blood chemistry non-invasively remains far less reliable. Solving this could make preventive healthcare monitoring dramatically more accessible.

Fishing fleets can evade detection in vast, poorly monitored ocean areas, undermining conservation efforts meant to protect fish populations. Better real-time monitoring at sea remains a critical unsolved gap.

Many heavily polluted cities in lower-income regions still lack dense, affordable monitoring networks that could help residents and policymakers respond in real time. Closing this data gap remains a persistent public health and environmental challenge.

Aircraft safety relies heavily on scheduled inspections rather than continuous, real-time structural monitoring, since affordable sensors capable of this level of detail remain limited. Expanding this kind of predictive monitoring remains an unresolved aviation challenge.

Many cities, especially in lower-income regions, lack dense, affordable air quality sensor networks capable of providing residents with accurate, real-time pollution information. Closing this monitoring gap remains an unresolved public health infrastructure challenge.

Current approaches to real-time monitoring and response systems for industrial chemical and oil spill events 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 autonomous systems for monitoring and maintaining critical undersea infrastructure. 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.

Current approaches to technologies enabling precise monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions from individual facilities 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 real-time monitoring systems for tracking the recovery of ecosystems after restoration interventions. 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.

Current approaches to technologies enabling the continuous monitoring of ocean health indicators at global scale 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.

Current approaches to non-invasive continuous monitoring of multiple chronic disease biomarkers 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 large share of rural handpumps and boreholes in Kenya sit broken at any given time because there is no real-time monitoring system to alert maintenance crews before communities revert to unsafe water sources.