Finalistes challenge Team up for Climate

Poseidon

World’s first amphibious house that floats on a calabash buoyant foundation

Imagine floods 3 times an year, loss of livelihood and livestock, rebuilding your house just to watch it get demolished again. The world's 600 million most economically fragile & flood vulnerable population live like this!

Instead of drowning, imagine the houses floated on water during a flood! We designed an amphibious house sensitive to the unique needs of the Dhemaji, India.

With locally sourced and inexpensive materials, an owner-led democratized construction approach, our design can easily be built and replicated by people themselves with minimal on-site guidance. Chemically treated bamboo is used for the walls and roofs, dry calabash is used for the buoyant foundation thus, allowing the house to float during floods.

Our locally designed model is alterable and replicable globally. Let’s float and fight by adapting to climate reality!

Eco-Megablock

Heat risk is a serious issue in tropical and subtropical megacities as urban heat island effect is intensified by global warming and rapid urbanization. Existing megablock planning is ineffective in addressing the issue and exacerbating thermal discomfort. Our solution is a systematic climate-adaptive method for optimizing megablock planning with nature-based solutions UGI through heat risk spatial identification, megablock typology analysis, planning simulations, etc.

The alternative optimized Eco-Megablock aims to address existing design limitations and maximize cooling efficiency, creating thermally comfortable neighborhoods. It will be a highly replicable and applicable toolkit/consulting service targeting urban planning practices and real estate developers with sustainability mindset in regions facing heat stress, aiming to create high-quality heat-adaptive living neighborhoods with multiple benefits including environmental sustainability, social wellbeing and economic efficiency.

La Petite Équipe

Climate change causes sea level rise, which causes coastal erosion. In Senegal, this environmental problem has socioeconomic repercussions due to degradation of infrastructure, ecosystems, and declining tourism industry; the net cost of coastal erosion in Senegal is approximately US$688 million. In Joal-Fadiouth in Petite Côte, the local population has experienced significant economic insecurities due to coastal erosion.

Our solution is to create an oyster farming cooperative that creates a 'living shoreline' to stabilise and maintain the coastline of Joal. This innovative solution will simultaneously reduce coastal erosion and increase economic stability through the creation of sustainable incomes from selling the oysters on the domestic Senegalese market; our project is economically and ecologically self-sustaining.

Additional benefits include the equitable distribution of profits via the cooperative model, food security, biodiversity restoration and water filtration by the oysters.

Impact Seekers

Impact seekers ideated a “smoke alarm” for farmers to detect fires before they become uncontrollable.

Impacts of wildfires on farmers in the northern region of Portugal are catastrophic. In 2017 was reported a burned area of 539 920 ha, causing 117 deaths with a cost of EUR 1,5 billion. Heat waves coupled with delay in fire detection result in severe damage to local agriculture, water shortages, loss of biodiversity, bad air quality and desertification.

The current response, manual and requiring constant patrolling, is inefficient and time consuming.

The Impact Seekers team designed an innovative integrated system to aid local authorities in handling these extreme conditions. The solution relies on sensors, that, placed in the forest, provide constant monitoring and early detection of fires. The sensors transmit data to an alarm system via SMS, allowing specialised staff to respond in real time to danger. Moreover, the system includes a weather station and a data collection system to map potential hazards and examine the condition of areas. Most of all, the versatility of the technology will allow us to make a major impact by leveraging the potential for scalability.

Who are the finalists of the Team up for Climate challenge?

Poseidon

Eco-Megablock

La Petite Équipe

Impact Seekers

The Jury's reactions