Six Ideas Aiming To Tackle Climate Change

Ask Lab partnered up with Adapting to Climate Change in China (ACCC) to host a startup competition entitled “Coding for Climate Change” on the past weekend (Aug.31-Sept.1). The event brings together designers, big-data researchers, and technologist to make an impact towards climate change with technology. Government sponsored researchers are involved to help the entrepreneurs to co-create amazing startups.

Here are the six projects that demoed at the final pitch of this competition:

1. Crazy Baby—This is a sequence game aiming to change people’s perception of water. In the game, a virtual character Crazy Baby runs around the house to turn on the electricity or water tap. In order to save water, users have to choose the optimal order in turning off these switches. If you turn off the water tap or shower first, then you are wrong, because electricity generation consumes more water resources. Each time the level started or loaded, there is a fact from the water cycling research which is explained very simply for the users to move to the next level.
2. Nostalgia—This project plans to establish a community where people working away from home can share their nostalgic feelings for their hometowns, especially when extreme weathers or disasters hit their hometowns. In addition, the users also can learn some climate changing knowledge provided by the ACCC in a bid to gain a deeper understanding of why these disasters happen more frequently than the past.
3. Green Transportation—The app provides index parameters to different means of transportation according to their environmental impacts. The users can share Green Transportation scores to their friends so as to celebrate a more environmental-friendly way of life.
4. Weather Nurse—Patients with chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and asthma, are very sensitive to even the slightest changes in climate. This app helps patients with those diseases to cope with sudden climate changes. After inputting some basic information such as kind of diseases, gender, age, location, Weather Nurse will push forward customized alerts to the users based on the inputted data. Patient data collected can be applied in researches or being used as guidance for medical product sellers.
5. Grassland Tourism—an inner-Mongolia tourism platform. It helps herdsmen to cope with the losses brought about by blizzards by adjusting their income structure. Tourists can live in the home of local shepherds to experience their way of life as well as the beautiful sceneries. The monetization model is to share commissions with herdsmen families and selling tourism gears.
6. Farmer Market—a web-based platform connecting farmers and citizens who want to buy safe foods.

A panel of judges including officials from the British and Swiss government, as well as investors focused on social-entrepreneurship granted100,000 yuan ($16,200) seed-funding to the first two teams, respectively.

Climate change is a problem often ignored by us, but it is indeed a factor closely related to every people’s lives. While most of the events related to this theme are held by governments, “Coding for Climate Change” helps those who are passionate about the subject to distill the massive obstacle of climate change into a personal and solvable challenge.