The Climate CoLab has announced twenty-two contests that seek high-impact ideas on how to tackle climate change.
A project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Collective Intelligence, the Climate CoLab seeks to harness the knowledge and expertise of thousands of experts and non-experts across the world to help solve this massive, complex issue.
The Climate CoLab has a rapidly growing community of over 30,000 members from across the world. Anyone is welcome to join the platform to submit their own ideas, or comment on and show support for other proposals on the site.
The contests cover a broad set of problems that lie at the heart of the climate change challenge, including: decarbonizing energy supply, shifting public attitudes and behavior, adapting to climate change, geoengineering, transportation, waste management, reducing consumption and others.
The U.S. Carbon Price contest is returning this year, which seeks innovative policy and political mobilization strategies on how to implement a carbon price in the United States, Climate CoLab says.
A number of contests are run in collaboration with organizations, such as the World Bank Negawatt Challenge (Urban Energy Efficiency); the MIT Sloan Latin America Office (Energy Solutions for Latin America); and the City of Somerville, MA (Atypical Solutions for Going Carbon Neutral).
In addition, this year Climate CoLab announced a new set of contests in which people can create climate action plans for major countries and for the whole world. In these contests, members combine proposals that have been submitted in other contests and use a suite of climate modeling tools to project the real-world climate impacts of the plans they create.
All contest winners will have an opportunity to present to people who can support the implementation of their ideas, including policy makers, business executives and NGO and foundation officials. They will also be invited to showcase their proposals at MIT this fall, where a $10,000 Grand Prize will be awarded. Last year, Danielle Dahan won the Grand Prize for her proposal, which addressed the shortage of qualified personnel to maintain the increasingly sophisticated heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in green buildings.
The contests are open until May 16.
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Founder & Principal Consultant, Hower Impact
Mike Hower is the founder of Hower Impact — a boutique consultancy delivering best-in-class strategic communication advisory and support for corporate sustainability, ESG and climate tech.
Published Mar 11, 2015 10am EDT / 7am PDT / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET