Today, at WDCD Live Amsterdam, What Design Can Do and its partners IKEA Foundation and Autodesk Foundation officially opened the call for participation of the WDCD Climate Action Challenge. The call for entries will be open until 21 August. The winners will share a prize package worth of €900,000 euros.
The WDCD Climate Action Challenge is a new global design competition calling on the creative community to submit innovative solutions to combat the impacts of climate change. It specifically focuses on the poorest and most vulnerable people, particularly in the Global South, who will suffer the brunt of climate change. The Climate Action Challenge follows after the impactful Refugee Challenge of 2016 (631 entries from 70 countries, 5 finalists).
Adapt to Climate Change
So far, most climate action has focused on reducing carbon emissions, in an attempt to limit global warming. But if we want to survive we need to adapt to the more frequent and intense natural disasters, as well as weather patterns that we’ve never seen before. We also have to deal with the consequences: food and water shortages, homelessness, ill health, mass migration, and conflict. For this reason, What Design Can Do invites designers, creative thinkers and imaginative trouble-shooters from all countries and disciplines, to participate in the challenge.
Three separate tracks
The Climate Action Challenge seeks design ideas that combat the impact of climate change. The best designs are innovative, practical, scalable, affordable, and easily understood. Challenge participants have until 21 August to submit their ideas. There are separate tracks and awards for students, creative professionals and start-ups. The challenge platform features an innovative briefing generator, helping participants to pick the best fitting brief.
Up to 21 winners, selected and valued by an international jury, share an award package worth €900.000 which includes a production budget and a tailor-made acceleration program to learn and to make their ideas, prototypes or start-ups market and investment ready.
Partners
The WDCD Climate Action Challenge is a joint initiative of design impact platform What Design Can Do, IKEA Foundation and Autodesk Foundation. The challenge brief has been drawn up together with research partner STBY. In the acceleration program the challenge partners work together with Social Enterprise NL.
Learn all the details at the WDCD Climate Action Challenge platform.