World Solve

Climate adaptation may favor a narrow set of crops and processing methods, threatening culinary heritage and local nutrition. Future food policy should preserve cultural diversity while meeting changing ecological conditions. 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.

Countries facing population decline may seek to influence reproductive decisions. The challenge is supporting people who want children, respecting those who do not, and addressing housing, work, care, and gender conditions rather than using coercive targets. 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.

Future cities may experience extreme heat precisely when electricity and water systems are least able to support cooling. The challenge is coordinating urban design, demand management, public health, and energy policy under compound stress. 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.

As heat, flooding, drought, and erosion intensify, some communities will need to move. The challenge is designing relocation policy that protects land rights, livelihoods, identity, and consent rather than turning climate adaptation into forced displacement. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Many consultation processes collect comments but provide no traceable response or rationale. Structured argument maps, versioned policy records, and privacy-aware participation analytics could improve accountability without reducing deliberation to popularity. The opportunity is intentionally human-scale: a cooperative, clinic, workshop, school, or municipal team could pilot it within one locality and measure outcomes before expanding. Mathematical modeling can help with coordinate uncertainty, incentives, or resource constraints; entrepreneurship can turn a reliable workflow into a viable service.

Unpaid domestic and care work performed predominantly by women in Papua New Guinea is largely excluded from national economic statistics and social protection policy, undervaluing its contribution.

A small number of companies control the primary channels through which most people discover and install mobile apps, giving them significant power over which businesses can reach customers at all. Balancing platform control with fair competition remains an unresolved policy issue.

Many popular games include purchasable randomized rewards that closely resemble gambling mechanics, and current age protections and regulations remain inconsistent across different countries and platforms. Protecting younger players from this remains an unresolved policy and design challenge.

Ageing populations, urban diets, and pollution will drive surges in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and chronic respiratory conditions. Scalable chronic-care models, digital coaching tools, and preventive policy reforms are needed.

Ultra-processed foods, changing agriculture, and altered gut microbiota may fuel future epidemics of obesity and metabolic disease. Microbiome-targeted therapies and nutrition-policy analytics will be important.

Access to anti-ageing interventions could be skewed toward wealthy groups without deliberate policy. Equity-oriented regulation and public programmes will be required.

Antarctic systems underpin climate regulation and biodiversity, but their economic and non-market value is rarely quantified. Valuation tools and decision-support models could elevate their importance in policy.

Scientific uncertainty makes it hard to define actionable thresholds for ice-sheet or ecosystem collapse in legal instruments. Science–policy translation platforms can help integrate risk ranges into governance.

Debates over future extraction lack robust cost–benefit analyses including climate and ecosystem services. Integrated economic–ecological modelling tools could inform policy.

South American economies grow around 2% per year on average, below global trends, making poverty reduction and fiscal sustainability difficult. Scenario-modelling tools and inclusive industrial-policy platforms can help governments design more resilient growth strategies.

Income, wealth, and access to quality services are highly skewed, limiting social mobility and cohesion across the region. Data-driven social policy design and targeted redistribution mechanisms could help escape the inequality trap.

Pandemic-era debts and modest growth make it hard to fund security, social policy, and climate adaptation. Debt-transparency dashboards and innovative financing instruments can support better decisions.

Shifting alliances and instability weaken regional organisations’ capacity to coordinate policy. Governance-analytics tools and flexible cooperation frameworks could support more resilient integration.

Statistical offices face capacity and resource constraints, leading to gaps in key indicators. Open-data and survey-modernisation platforms can improve information.

Rapid decarbonisation efforts raise energy and compliance costs for manufacturers who also face global competition. Industrial decarbonisation toolkits and green-finance matchmaking platforms can help firms adapt.