World Solve

Climate change and urban pumping changes may cause groundwater to enter basements, transit systems, utilities, and foundations. Cities need mapping, waterproofing, drainage, and financing strategies that address slow cumulative damage. The design must remain functional when standards, trade routes, data access, and diplomatic cooperation are unreliable. 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.

Urban growth, migration, and climate change will outpace traditional master planning. The challenge is designing governance that can revise land use, service delivery, and infrastructure priorities continuously without becoming arbitrary. This becomes particularly difficult in post-conflict institutions, because public institutions must remain fair, resilient, and accountable while adapting to new risks.

By the 2030s and 2040s, extreme heat and shifting mosquito ranges will expand malaria, dengue, and other infections into new regions. Heat-health early-warning systems and climate-sensitive disease-modelling platforms must be deployed.

Rising temperatures and changing winds are destabilising ice shelves and altering Southern Ocean circulation, with global implications for sea-level rise and extreme weather. High-resolution coupled climate–ice models and sustained observation networks are needed to predict these changes.

Agriculture, hydropower, and urban water supplies are increasingly affected by changing rainfall and heat patterns. Climate-risk modelling and adaptation investment platforms can help prioritise responses.

Extreme events cause health impacts and infrastructure damage, testing adaptation plans. Urban heat and flood-risk modelling tools plus nature-based solution marketplaces can support responses.

Traditional staples become harder to grow in regions facing heat and drought. Climate-resilient seeds and diversified cropping systems can buffer risk.

Water planning based on historical norms is becoming unreliable. Scenario-based planning and storage investments are needed.

Poor drainage and standing water in fast-growing cities create ideal breeding grounds, overwhelming health systems during outbreaks. AI-based outbreak prediction and community larvae-control apps could reduce case spikes.

Droughts, floods, and cyclones are intensifying across the continent despite Africa's minimal historical carbon footprint. Climate adaptation financing mechanisms tailored to African needs remain underdeveloped.

Schools in high-risk disaster zones teach abstract science without practical climate resilience, disaster survival, and local ecosystem stewardship modules.

Ocean currents regulate weather and temperature worldwide, and small changes could have outsized global effects. Current climate models still can't predict these shifts with the precision policymakers need.

Cooling saves lives during extreme heat, but most air conditioners rely on energy sources and refrigerants that contribute to climate change. A low-emission cooling solution accessible to poorer regions remains urgently needed.

Decisions about climate change, resource use, and debt all require some answer to how much weight future, non-existent people deserve compared to those who exist now. Philosophers disagree sharply on this tradeoff.

Insect populations, including many pollinators, have been declining in various regions due to habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change, threatening the broader ecosystems and agriculture that depend on them. Reversing this decline at scale remains unresolved.

Historic sites are being lost to conflict, flooding, and neglect faster than preservation efforts can keep up, often permanently. Cheaper, faster preservation methods could save irreplaceable pieces of human history.

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.

Direct air capture exists, but it's still far too expensive and energy-intensive to make a dent in global emissions. Making it cheap enough to scale is one of the biggest levers left for slowing climate change.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for methods for restoring the productivity and resilience of agricultural systems under climate change creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.

Current approaches to methods for assessing the cumulative impacts of climate change and other stressors on human health either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.