World Solve

Families experiencing severe economic distress caused by crop failures increasingly resort to marrying off young daughters to reduce household living expenses.

Upstream dam operations retain river water during droughts, starving downstream nations of water needed for agriculture and electricity generation.

As some regions become less livable due to heat, drought, or flooding, governments often lack a clear, proactive plan for how internal migration should be managed. This leaves affected communities dealing with sudden, poorly supported relocation.

Malnutrition during early childhood can cause lifelong developmental harm, and crises like war or drought regularly disrupt food access for vulnerable children. Building more resilient food delivery systems in crisis zones remains urgently unresolved.

Wars, droughts, and shipping disruptions can send food prices soaring almost overnight, hitting poorer households hardest. A more resilient global food system could soften these shocks before they cause real hunger.

Droughts, floods, and shifting seasons are making traditional farming less reliable in many regions. Crops that can handle this unpredictability are essential to keeping global food supply stable.

Develop methods to quantify livelihoods, health, culture, land, and social losses caused by drought, salinization, erosion, and chronic heat.

Design water-allocation and enforcement systems that reduce consumption among high users without shifting disproportionate burdens onto low-income residents.

Develop species selection, watering, soil protection, maintenance financing, and monitoring systems that allow urban tree canopies to survive rapid development.

Design legal and social systems for relocating communities exposed to erosion, flooding, drought, or sea-level rise while preserving rights, livelihoods, and identity.

Develop locally calibrated weather and generation models for grids affected by rapidly changing clouds, aerosols, heat, and seasonal rainfall.

Preserve, improve, and distribute farmer-preferred crop varieties that tolerate local drought, flood, salinity, and pests while retaining cultural and market value.

Smallholder farmers in Romania lack affordable, low-evaporation water storage to bridge increasingly erratic rainy seasons, forcing crop failure during even short dry spells.

Achieving nature-based solutions for drought resilience that also support biodiversity and carbon goals 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.

Despite recognition of its importance, reliable methods for designs for resilient food systems that maintain nutrition under multi-year drought are still lacking. Progress is hindered by incomplete mechanistic knowledge, high capital and operational barriers, and the absence of deployment models suited to the contexts of greatest need.