World Solve

Climate change, inequality, and other large problems result from systems, not just individual choices, yet blame and responsibility are still often placed on individuals. How we think about this shapes both policy and personal guilt.

Millions of people now earn a living through app-based gig work without the healthcare, sick leave, or retirement benefits traditional jobs offer. Extending fair protections to this growing workforce remains largely unresolved.

Large multinational companies can shift profits between countries to minimize taxes, leaving many nations without a fair share of revenue from businesses operating within their borders. A truly fair global tax system remains unresolved.

Many large-scale policies are implemented based on assumptions rather than solid evidence, and by the time results come in, the damage or waste is already done. Better testing methods could save enormous public resources.

Training today's largest AI models can consume as much electricity as thousands of homes use in a year. Without more efficient methods, AI's environmental cost will keep climbing alongside its capabilities.

Current detectors cost billions of dollars and can only catch the largest cosmic collisions. A cheaper detection method would let us study the universe's most violent events far more often.

We can now detect many dangerous asteroids years in advance, but we still lack a proven way to redirect or destroy one heading for Earth. One unlucky strike could cause damage on a civilization-ending scale.

Gravity describes the large scale universe well, and quantum mechanics describes the tiny scale well, but the two don't fit together mathematically. A unified theory would finally explain what happens inside black holes and at the birth of the universe.

Achieving protocols for the responsible sharing and use of large-scale human genomic and health data at meaningful scale demands simultaneous progress in fundamental research, engineering integration and socio-technical systems that work for low- and middle-income settings. Existing efforts remain fragmented relative to the magnitude of the challenge.

Land ownership records in Brazil remain largely paper-based and inconsistently maintained, fueling disputes, fraud, and insecurity of tenure that discourage long-term investment.

Smallholder farmers in Myanmar lose a substantial share of harvested grain to pests, mold, and poor storage before it ever reaches market, largely due to the cost of hermetic storage technology.

Limited economic opportunity in rural areas of Morocco is driving large-scale youth migration to cities that lack the infrastructure or job market to absorb them.

Organic waste makes up a large share of landfilled municipal waste in Papua New Guinea, generating methane emissions that could be avoided with accessible composting infrastructure.

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.

Informal settlements in Yemen largely rely on pit latrines with no formal desludging service, leading to overflow into waterways and elevated diarrheal disease rates among children.

Rapid urban growth in Indonesia has produced large informal settlements lacking basic infrastructure, and in-place upgrading approaches remain rare compared to displacement-driven redevelopment models.

Develop standards and low-cost protections for irrigation controllers, sensors, drones, and farm equipment that may become attack vectors.

Develop fair consultation, compensation, benefit-sharing, ecological assessment, and appeals systems for large solar, wind, and transmission projects.

Develop credible reporting, legal protection, evidence handling, and anti-retaliation systems outside large corporations and public institutions.

Create practical electrification, heat-pump, biomass, solar-thermal, and process-efficiency solutions for firms unable to finance large decarbonization projects.