2020 has been a wake-up call for India with climate impacts aggravating the pandemic, with cyclones, forest fires, locust attacks, floods...
Extreme events like COVID and climate crisis highlight the vulnerability of the marginalized groups and the need for mainstreaming adaptation-resilience in our development frameworks.
In India, the voice of local communities, active participation of the youth, innovation, and entrepreneurship are essential to building a climate resilience India.
****We aim to kickstart and facilitate such a movement, starting with an innovation boot camp on Sept 19-20 under the UNLEASH Hacks banner.
UNLEASH is a global initiative committed to bringing the world’s top talents together to innovate for the Sustainable Development Goals. UNLEASH has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential sustainability brands (Onalytica) and has held three Innovation Labs in Denmark, Singapore, and China.
Now during the pandemic times, UNLEASH Hacks is aiming to scale the UNLEASH reach globally through online innovation-competitions.
Note: This is NOT a coding-hackathon restricted to computer geeks. UNLEASH hacks rather provides a platform and methodology to innovate for 'sustainability challenges' like climate change. UNLEASH innovation process can be seen as made up of five phases as seen in the diagram. We will focus on the first two phases.
This captures the previous annual UNLEASH event. We are trying to recreate the same experience online through UNLEASH Hacks now that we are stuck at home due to COVID-19.
After opening, introductions, and team building, we will get to the first phase of the innovation process - problem framing. Here, the teams will dig deeper into how climate change is affecting India, specifically, their own communities are impacted by events like heatwaves, droughts, floods, food shortages, refugee migration, etc. Aim of this exercise will be to find out why adaptation and resilience practices don't exist, and why existing solutions are insufficient or failing.
After the problem-framing phase, teams focus on coming up with multiple ideas that can solve the individual problems they've selected from day-1. Having interdisciplinary teams with diverse backgrounds will help to think from different angles and come up with innovative ideas. At the end of the day, teams will pitch their own solutions to a jury panel who will select the top three teams.
We all are in this fight against climate impacts for the long term, so YES! we will bug you even after the hack😈. We are working on a post-hack program to support the teams to reach the accelerator stage and connect to the right platforms. Details coming soon...
https://www.theworldcounts.com/embed/challenges/23
Assistant Manager, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, KPMG India
Technology Development Lead, Engineers Without Borders Australia
Associate Director, Sustainability and Community Programs UBC Botanical Garden
Senior Manager Innovation and Strategy, Deloitte
CEO, Footprint App; Carbon Opportunities Analyst, Shell
SDGs can be confusing🤷🏻♂️, but important👩🏻💻 to understand. Read what they are here.
13.1 Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.
13.2 Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning.
13.3 Improve education, awareness-raising, and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction, and early warning.
13.b Promote mechanisms for raising capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management in the least developed countries and small island developing States, including focusing on women, youth, and local and marginalized communities.
8.3 Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services.
8.4 Improve progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production and endeavor to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, in accordance with the10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production, with developed countries taking the lead.