World Solve

More shipping, seismic surveys, construction, and autonomous systems could disrupt whales, fish, and other marine life. Solutions require low-noise engineering, ecosystem monitoring, routing, and enforceable acoustic limits. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.

Thousands of satellites may provide connectivity while increasing collision risk, radio interference, light pollution, and disposal complexity. The challenge is creating enforceable coordination and end-of-life standards across commercial and state operators. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.

Heatwaves may force governments to decide who gets priority access to cooling centers, electricity, transport, and medical care. The challenge is building allocation rules that are both ethical and operationally enforceable. The challenge is especially acute across fragmented municipalities, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

As machine learning enters welfare, policing, housing, tax, and licensing systems, bias can become harder to detect and contest. The open problem is creating enforceable standards for fairness, appeals, and independent review across all public-sector uses of automated decision-making. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Vehicle emissions, crop burning, and industrial smoke create hazardous smog seasons in cities like Delhi and Jakarta. Low-cost air-purification tech and stricter enforceable emission-trading systems are needed.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is ambiguous regarding commercial resource extraction and private property. Clear, enforceable international frameworks are needed to encourage private investment in off-world mining.

Indigenous land rights are frequently overridden by governments or corporations pursuing resource extraction or development. Meaningful, enforceable control over ancestral land remains unresolved in many countries.

Some communities have lived with contaminated air, water, or soil for generations due to nearby industrial activity, with little formal compensation or cleanup. Establishing fair, enforceable accountability remains a persistent governance gap.

Develop enforceable, worker-centered protections for safety, pay, benefits, bargaining, and grievance resolution outside conventional employment. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.

Develop enforceable systems that ensure indigenous peoples and local communities share in benefits from commercial use of biological resources and knowledge.

Create enforceable safety training, reporting, protective equipment, housing, wage, and contractor-accountability systems for transient workers.

Build enforceable recruitment, contract, wage, mobility, complaint, and shelter systems for workers isolated within private homes.

Create enforceable design standards that prevent manipulative engagement, data extraction, profiling, and advertising in products marketed to children.

Develop enforceable, economically viable protections for construction workers, delivery workers, street vendors, farm laborers, and factory workers exposed to dangerous heat.

Citizens of Ethiopia generate growing volumes of personal data through digital services, but existing legal frameworks lack enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for misuse.