World Solve

Ocean shipping produces a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet the industry has been slower than others to adopt cleaner fuel alternatives at scale. Speeding up this transition remains an unresolved climate challenge.

Many cities lack convenient composting systems, so a significant share of food waste that could be composted still ends up in landfills producing methane. Scaling accessible composting infrastructure remains an unresolved urban sustainability challenge.

Tropical forests host a huge share of the world's biodiversity, and converting this land for farming, even when done for legitimate food needs, often results in permanent species loss. Balancing food production with biodiversity protection remains unresolved.

Construction and demolition debris makes up a significant share of total waste in many rapidly growing cities, and recycling this material at scale remains inconsistently practiced. Reducing this waste stream remains an unresolved urban sustainability issue.

Conventional cotton farming uses significant water and pesticides, and while more sustainable methods exist, they remain a small share of overall global production. Scaling sustainable practices to become the industry norm remains unresolved.

Fish populations often migrate across international boundaries, but management practices and quotas can vary significantly between neighboring countries sharing the same stock. Aligning these practices for shared, sustainable management remains unresolved.

A large share of organic waste still ends up in landfills producing methane simply because industrial composting infrastructure isn't available in enough regions. Building this capacity out at the scale needed remains an unresolved waste management challenge.

Developers still occasionally and accidentally commit sensitive credentials directly into shared code repositories, creating avoidable security exposure. More robust default protections against this common mistake remain inconsistently adopted.

Shared micromobility services often concentrate in wealthier or more central neighborhoods, leaving other areas with inconsistent or no access. Ensuring equitable coverage remains an unresolved urban technology deployment challenge.

Modern hearing aids remain prohibitively expensive for a large share of the global population that could benefit from them, leaving hearing loss untreated in many communities. Making this technology genuinely affordable at scale remains unresolved.

Most human knowledge lives in systems vulnerable to disaster, conflict, or simple neglect, with no single resilient backup for civilization's collective information. A well-protected global archive could safeguard this against permanent loss.

Space missions are still largely framed as national or corporate accomplishments rather than shared human ones, even though the benefits and risks affect everyone. A more collaborative model could accelerate progress and broaden its benefits.

Some countries and individuals consume vastly more resources than others, and there's no broadly accepted definition of what a fair share would even look like. This makes global cooperation on resource use difficult to justify to everyone involved.

Vaccine mandates, speed limits, and lockdown policies all raise the same underlying question of how much individual liberty should bend for collective benefit. Different people and cultures answer this very differently, with no clear resolution.

Surveillance can prevent crime and terrorism, but it also erodes personal freedom, and there's no consensus on where the right balance lies. Different societies draw this line in very different places.

As AI systems become more capable, questions about whether they deserve any form of moral consideration are becoming less theoretical. Society has no shared answer for where, if anywhere, that line should be drawn.

When automation replaces jobs, the resulting profits mostly go to business owners and shareholders, not the workers who lost their income. A fairer system for sharing these gains remains an unsolved economic and political question.

Wages in many cities haven't kept pace with housing costs, pushing homeownership and even renting out of reach for a growing share of workers. This is now a shared crisis across cities on almost every continent.

As automation and AI displace routine and increasingly cognitive labor, most economies still assume most people need traditional jobs to survive and find purpose. Without a credible alternative, mass automation risks instability rather than shared benefit.

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.