Governments are increasingly using AI to identify redundant, outdated or burdensome regulations. This can speed up reform, but efficiency alone is not enough. Without public judgement, simplification risks removing rules that protect health, safety, equity and the environment.

The Green Tape Challenge shows a different approach. It pairs artificial intelligence with collective intelligence to improve how decisions are made, not just how fast they are made. AI performs a first pass — mapping complexity, identifying duplication, and surfacing patterns that are difficult for humans to see. People then add what machines cannot: context, values, lived experience and judgement.

In October, Political Watch and mySociety convened policymakers, technologists and citizens to explore how this combination could work in practice. Together, the group set out to answer a deceptively hard question: How might the City of Boston replace red tape with green tape — governance that is simpler, fairer, and smarter without sacrificing the public interest? What they produced over the course of the brief but intense "idea-a-thon" was not a single technical solution, but a structured process, designed to ground modernization in purpose rather than mere efficiency. The city is now building solutions based on the results of the challenge.

By pairing machine analysis with collective judgement, governments can reduce unnecessary burden while strengthening — not weakening — the public interest.

Rising sea levels are turning climate change into a question of survival for low-lying island states like Tuvalu, where the highest point sits only a few metres above sea level.

In 2023, Australia and Tuvalu signed a landmark treaty that treats mobility as part of climate adaptation, rather than as an emergency or refugee response. Under the agreement, Australia created the Pacific Engagement Visa, a dedicated pathway allowing up to 280 Tuvaluan citizens each year to gain permanent residency through a ballot, without requiring a job offer. The visa is explicitly linked to climate risk and long-term resilience, setting a precedent for state-to-state mobility arrangements in response to sea-level rise. In doing so, it reframes migration policy as climate adaptation infrastructure, expanding how governments plan for climate risk.

Across Europe, young people are losing trust in democratic institutions — and fewer are taking part. Traditional civics lessons often explain how democracy works but rarely give students the chance to experience it.

In Portugal, social enterprise MyPolis is taking a different approach. Working with schools and local governments, MyPolis uses curriculum-embedded games that turn civic participation into something practical, social and fun.

Already used in more than 100 schools, the platform allows young people to learn by doing. From age six, students identify problems in their communities, design solutions and present them to decision-makers. In one game, children map local issues and propose fixes; in another, they debate and prioritise how public money should be spent. Crucially, governments are required to respond clearly — “yes”, “no” or “not yet” — so participation leads to real feedback.

The impact is visible. Students have helped improve road safety, shape youth festivals, and influence local services. Each action builds skills and confidence, showing young people that their voices matter.

As MyPolis expands beyond Portugal, it offers a compelling lesson: when young people are trusted with real decisions, participation follows. What would change if more schools taught democracy this way — through action, not abstraction?

Najmara, led by the Dubai Future Foundation, is an education initiative rethinking how young children (ages 3–10) learn. Rather than treating school as a place to absorb information, it approaches education as a living system shaped by culture, nature, community, and self-awareness.

Rooted in Emirati values, Najmara focuses on character, emotional intelligence, and sustainability alongside academic learning. Its curriculum replaces age-based classrooms with multi-age groups, and traditional lessons with hands-on “learning quests” and nature-based activities that build curiosity, resilience, and collaboration.

Daily rhythms, reflection and peer learning help children process experiences and develop a strong sense of belonging and purpose. Najmara challenges the idea that education is about content alone. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, what skills should schools prioritise — and how might systems evolve to nurture the human capacities technology cannot replace?

In the rural Japanese town of Kawara, an ageing and shrinking population had weakened everyday connections between generations. Kawara’s population reached around 19,000 in the post–Second World War period but has since declined to fewer than 10,000, with over 40% of residents now aged 65 or older. Children and older residents increasingly lived side by side without interacting, and the town was struggling with declining cohesion and morale.

A local response emerged in an unexpected form: a trading card game featuring real middle-aged and elderly men from the community. The Ojisan Trading Card Game turns local figures — a former train driver, a retired robotics expert, a soba chef, even the town mayor — into playable cards with attributes like hit points and magic points. Designed by community council secretary general, the game was created to help children and older residents recognise one another and interact naturally.

The result has been simple but powerful. Children now engage more in community life, adults once unknown to their neighbours have become familiar faces, and Kawara has drawn visitors curious to see the game firsthand.

“Not many people knew of Kawara, but that has changed thanks to the card game,” says Tsuruga. “It’s true we have a depopulation problem, so if the game gets people to come here, who knows, some might even decide to live here. Above all, it’s done wonders for the psychology of the town.”

Japan’s truancy crisis, futōkō, is getting worse. In 2022, more than 244,000 elementary and junior high school students missed 30 days or more of school. For many children, formal education — with its classrooms, timetables and pressure to attend — has become a source of stress rather than support.

In the city of Ueda, in Nagano Prefecture, a local initiative challenges what education is meant to look like. The Ueda Children’s Cinema Club has transformed a century-old cinema into a welcoming space for children who find it difficult to attend school. The city’s Board of Education now recognises time spent at the cinema as learning. Five schools already count cinema attendance as part of the school day. Approximately half of the club members have started returning to school at their own pace and have expressed an interest in moving forward.

The Ueda Cinema Club has played a key role in redefining education locally, prompting the Board of Education to recognise informal, child-centred learning spaces. Its approach flips the traditional model: learning adapts to the child, not the other way around. By treating a cultural space as part of the education system, Ueda keeps children connected to learning while protecting their wellbeing. What would change if education extended into the city, instead of stopping at the school gate?

Disaster resilience is often planned around roads, levees and emergency services. However, in the first hours and days after a disaster, people usually rely on neighbours, local networks and community spaces for information, help and support. These social connections shape how quickly communities mobilise and recover yet they are rarely measured or prioritised in risk planning.

In response, Resilient Ready launched Sociabli, the world’s first government-backed initiative to map social capital and infrastructure on a national scale. Using evidence-based measures of indicators like trust, cooperation and connection, Sociabli is creating a groundbreaking map that shows where communities are socially strong or fragile. Piloted in three communities, it shows that places with stronger networks and trusted leaders mobilise and recover faster. By making social resilience visible, Sociabli pushes for a move from reactive to proactive disaster policy, helping governments direct resources where social resilience is weakest before the next disaster.

Sociabli opens the door to a new way of planning for disasters — one where governments can strengthen communities in advance, target support where it is most needed and rethink what resilience looks like beyond physical infrastructure.

Non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer are the leading cause of death globally, accounting for 71% of all deaths. This growing burden places sustained pressure on health systems and underscores the limits of care models that respond only after illness appears.

In Abu Dhabi, the Department of Health has focused on prevention as a way to support long-term population health planning, more efficient resource allocation and sustained innovation. Central to this approach is the idea that personalised, preventive care must be scalable if it is to function as a public good rather than a service available only to a few.

To support this shift, Abu Dhabi has built an Intelligent Health System that integrates medical records, insurance data, genomics and environmental and lifestyle data within a fully sovereign, privacy-protected ecosystem. In August 2025, the system enabled the launch of comprehensive newborn genomic screening for more than 800 preventable conditions, identifying three infants with genetic disorders within the first month and allowing early intervention. Building on this foundation, the Department of Health, in collaboration with Microsoft, developed an AI-powered population health intelligence platform that brings these data together into a unified digital twin of the health ecosystem, enabling predictive insights and targeted interventions. Population health data also informs public health campaigns, policies and infrastructure designed to influence behaviour and improve food and fitness environments.

If prevention can be designed as shared infrastructure — connecting clinical care, data, policy and the built environment — how might this reshape the way health systems plan for population wellbeing elsewhere?

Advanced medical imaging dominates breast cancer detection — but it is expensive, unevenly available, and often out of reach in low-resource settings. Discovering Hands offers a different model.

In India, visually impaired women are trained as Medical Tactile Examiners (MTEs), using their heightened sense of touch to conduct structured breast examinations. Working centimetre by centimetre with braille-marked guides, they can detect lumps as small as 6–8 mm, often earlier than the 10–20 mm typically found in standard clinical exams. Studies cited by the programme show detection rates comparable to physicians, with particularly strong results where formal screening systems are absent.

Delivered through partnerships with hospitals, disability organisations and community providers, the approach expands access to early detection while creating skilled, dignified employment. What other public systems could work better if they were designed around capabilities we usually overlook?

Maternal deaths are often caused not by a lack of medical knowledge, but by delay. Timely access to emergency obstetric care can cut maternal deaths by up to 50% and intrapartum stillbirths by up to 75%. Nigeria accounts for around 28% of global maternal health deaths.

The OnTIME Consortium is taking a novel perspective: coordination and logistics. Using Google’s directions API alongside verified data on emergency obstetric care facilities, they’ve designed a tool that estimates travel times and distances to the nearest first, second and third facilities across Nigeria’s 15 largest cities. By making delays visible, the tool helps policymakers identify where lives are lost to logistics — from gaps in ambulance services to poor roads to missing facilities. Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health has highlighted its potential to inform responses beyond maternal care.

What if improving children’s immune systems didn’t require more disinfectant – but more dirt? In Finland, researchers from the Natural Resources Institute and Tampere University are testing this idea by rewilding kindergarten playgrounds.

Through the Vahvistu project, the greenspace of 43 kindergartens have been transformed into living ecosystems using forest floor materials, soil and plants. Children dig, forage, compost, grow food, and play in environments designed to maximise everyday contact with biodiversity.

The results challenge long-held assumptions. Within weeks, children showed measurable improvements in immune regulation, including increases in T regulatory cells that protect against autoimmune disease. After a year, they had fewer harmful bacteria on their skin and in their gut, including reductions in microbes linked to inflammatory and infectious diseases.

As urban life narrows children’s contact with nature, Vahvistu flips the script on public health: instead of shielding children from microbes, it builds beneficial exposure directly into daily life.

Disaster response often struggles with a paradox: thousands of people want to help, but without coordination their efforts can slow things down rather than speed them up.

After severe flooding hit Romagna, Italy in 2023, an unexpected solution emerged. Volontari SOS adapted a digital platform originally built by Rockin’1000 to coordinate tens of thousands of volunteer musicians. Repurposed for emergency response, the platform allowed municipalities to define tasks, match volunteers to shifts, and track progress in real time. Within days, it mobilised over 50,000 volunteers, coordinating 20,000+ shifts across 13 municipalities, often with just one or two municipal staff per location. The system now maintains a standing pool of registered volunteers, ready to be activated for future crises. Rather than building new emergency infrastructure, Volontari SOS shows how governments can borrow existing community networks and scale them fast.

The UAE is building one of the world’s first fully integrated open finance systems, moving beyond open banking to connect payments, lending, insurance, investments and cross-border transfers into a single connected system. Rather than relying on fragmented bilateral connections, the system is designed from the ground up to allow financial data and services to move securely and instantly between trusted participants.

At the centre of this architecture is Nebras, a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE. Nebras operates the national API hub and shared infrastructure that all licensed financial institutions and approved third-party providers must use. It standardises how data is exchanged, manages trust, identity and consent, and ensures interoperability across the entire ecosystem — turning open finance into a coordinated public infrastructure rather than a patchwork of private integrations.

By shrinking processes that once took weeks into minutes, the framework enables faster access to capital for businesses, lower transaction costs for merchants and more accurate financial services for consumers. What other public systems could be redesigned if data moved this seamlessly across institutions?

Local economies often ‘leak’ value: visitors spend money but it quickly flows out to external suppliers, owners and intermediaries. Even when tourism is booming, it is hard for communities to create stable, self-sustaining local economies.

Shorefast, a Canadian charity founded on Fogo Island, has developed a unique solution: The Economic Nutrition Label. Imagine the transparency of a food nutrition label but repurposed for goods and services. It shows where each dollar goes, how much stays local and what it pays for including wages, and suppliers — aiming to build trust, empower informed purchasing and strengthen local economies. The impact is tangible: on Fogo Island, Economic Nutrition has helped retain over half of visitor spending within the community and generated more than CAD 235 million in economic activity across Newfoundland and Labrador. The label was initially adopted by businesses but is currently being tested also by municipalities.

Labels make the invisible visible. Applied to the economy, they turn awareness into action — helping communities keep more value where it’s created. Imagine a government building with an economic nutrition label.

People generate enormous amounts of data every day — but most have no say over how it’s used and see little benefit from the value it creates. Instead, personal data quietly powers today’s digital and AI-driven economy, with profits flowing mainly to large platforms and intermediaries.

Brazil’s dWallet pilot is testing a different model. Led by the state-owned company Dataprev, it treats personal data as something people can own and manage. Through a Personal dWallet, individuals can request their data from companies and receive official certificates confirming their ownership. These sit within a Data Savings Plan, which sets clear rules for how the data can be used.

Companies can then choose to license data under these terms — when they do, value flows back to individuals as rewards or income, similar to earning interest on savings. Since launching in October 2025, thousands of people have already retrieved their data from more than 80 companies, with monetisation rolling out in early 2026.

By giving people ownership, control and a share in the value of their data, dWallet begins to rebalance the data economy — shifting it from extraction to participation. It asks: what would change if citizens earned from the data economy, instead of being excluded from it?

Energy policy often treats surplus power as a technical headache and energy poverty as a separate social problem. Western Australia tested a different idea: solving both through the same system design.

In July 2023, the WA Government launched the Community Energy programme, offering free electricity from 9am to 3pm for customers experiencing ongoing financial hardship. The goal is twofold: reduce bills for households and shift consumption into the middle of the day, when rooftop solar can create an oversupply on the grid. News coverage reported the benefit could be worth up to $500 per year for eligible households, with the programme delivered through electricity credits rather than new infrastructure. Abundance becomes an asset, not a liability.

In Pakistan, Akhuwat has redesigned how finance works by replacing collateral and credit scores with trust, dignity, and community accountability. Instead of treating poverty as financial risk, it treats it as a social responsibility shared by the community.

Akhuwat operates the world’s largest interest-free microfinance system. Loans are issued through community spaces such as mosques, churches and temples, where applicants are supported by local guarantors who vouch for them. This shifts risk assessment away from paperwork and toward social trust. Loans are given publicly, repaid in small instalments and recycled through a revolving fund to support future borrowers.

So far, Akhuwat has disbursed 6.7 million loans worth USD 1.6 billion, reached 4 million families, and impacted 24 million people, while maintaining a 99.9% repayment rate. Over time, many borrowers become donors themselves, creating a self-sustaining cycle of reciprocity. Now active in 400 cities across Pakistan, Akhuwat has expanded into education, vocational training, disaster relief and Pakistan’s first tuition-free residential university — showing how rethinking financial systems can unlock long-term social change.

Around 80% of population health is shaped outside healthcare, by transport, energy, food systems and the built environment. In fast-growing cities, health risks like pollution, heat and unsafe streets often escalate long before they appear in official data or disease statistics.

UrbanBetter takes a revolutionary approach, treating cities as living patients. Like bodies, cities are seen as complex adaptive systems where many factors interact to shape health. In Lagos, UrbanBetter mobilises and equips young people to act as citizen scientists, capturing real-time urban ‘vital signs’ such as air quality with digital tools. During a city marathon, participants collected data showing air pollution fell by 60% when roads were closed. That evidence helped secure a government agreement to implement non-motorised transport policies and infrastructure. By applying clinical thinking to cities, UrbanBetter reframes urban planning around monitoring and early intervention, rather than waiting for harm.

What else would change if cities were treated as patients, not just contexts for disease?

Rio de Janeiro faces major urban challenges, including access to housing for hundreds of thousands of people living in informal settlements, known as favelas. These neighbourhoods are dense and fast-changing yet poorly captured by traditional maps — leaving them underrepresented in city planning.

Favelas 4D came from the mind of Rio's Head of Urban Planning, Washington Fajardo, who approached MIT with the idea of using LiDAR technology. Fajardo was told that they were not aware of such an application for urban planning but they were willing to explore this with him.

Rio’s Secretariat of Science and Technology has partnered with MIT to launch Senseable City Rio, a pioneering urban lab that uses advanced sensing tools to make favelas visible in data. Through visual AI and sensing platforms, the city can better understand how these neighbourhoods are built, how they evolve and where small, targeted changes could improve daily life. Young men, those most at risk in favelas to being attracted to a life of violence, have been engaged to use the technology as wardens of the mapping effort.

The data helps answer practical questions: where airflow could be improved to reduce heat, where greenery would have the greatest cooling effect, how land tenure can be better documented and which buildings are vacant or underused. Instead of broad assumptions, planners can design precise interventions with communities that were previously invisible.

By turning hidden neighbourhoods into visible ones, Senseable City Rio is helping the city move from guesswork to action.

Tourism is responsible for a sizeable share of global carbon emissions. Many cities control overtourism through taxes and restrictions; but Copenhagen is testing a radically different approach.

In 2024, Wonderful Copenhagen, working with the Municipality of Copenhagen, introduced CopenPay. Instead of penalising tourists for their footprint, the scheme incentivises them to leave a positive one. After a successful pilot, it returned for a nine-week run in 2025. Visitors could ‘pay’ for cultural attractions with climate-positive behaviour — accessing activities like free bike rentals, complimentary lunches and boat tours if they arrived by train, volunteered at urban farms or joined river clean-ups. The 2025 run saw bike rentals increase by 59% and found that 70% of visitors left motivated to act more sustainably.

CopenPay is an example of how tourism can be used to incentivise behavioural change. If tourism is here to stay — which it is — the challenge becomes not how to limit it, but how to reshape it. What more could cities do to reduce tourism’s impact on local communities? And how might they invite visitors to actively contribute to the places they pass through?

Imagine if governments were to harvest the power of other intelligent lifeforms that evolves over millions of years. Using them to optimise urban transit routes and enhance transportation systems, minimising congestion and improving efficiency. The slime mold may not have a brain, but it displays second to none navigating skills to get resources from point A to point B as efficiently and resiliently as possible.

Designing city transport networks is difficult because planners must balance speed, cost and resilience. To explore alternative approaches, researchers at the University of Toronto developed a virtual model inspired by Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism that forms vein-like networks to transport nutrients. The model mirrors the organism’s two-stage growth process: first generating a dense mesh around key points, then reinforcing the most effective paths while removing redundancies.

When tested on 17 major Toronto subway stations, the model produced a network that was 40% less susceptible to disruption than the existing system, while maintaining the same travel time. Similar approaches have been explored in other countries, with potential applications beyond transport, including energy and communication networks. What other intelligent life forms could influence a more sustainable future?

In 2024–2025, Helsinki achieved what most cities still consider impossible: zero traffic-related deaths. Rather than relying on one fix, the city pursued long-term, data-driven changes across its transport and urban systems.

Key measures included lowering speed limits to 30 km/h in most residential areas and the city centre, enforcing them with 70 speed cameras, and aligning policing with Finland’s Vision Zero policy. Over time, Helsinki also redesigned streets to slow drivers, expanded pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and strengthened public transport. Between 2003 and 2023, traffic-related injuries fell from 727 to just 14.

Helsinki’s experience suggests that safety emerges from how systems work together, not from single interventions. What other public challenges might be solved by designing whole systems around human behaviour, rather than adding isolated fixes?

The typical public transport system is designed top-down: planners decide routes, timetables and stops years in advance — hoping people use them. But what if we didn’t ask people to adapt to transport systems, we asked transport systems to adapt to people?

That’s exactly what Shanghai is experimenting with. With their new kind of public bus, the ‘DZ’, routes don’t precede demand, they emerge from it. It allows residents to propose routes and schedules digitally. Once enough people opt in, the service goes live. Since launch, over 220 demand-driven routes have been created across all 16 districts. It’s reduced underused trips and increased system efficiency — all without expanding fixed infrastructure. Popular lines like DZ301 now connect major metro stations with homes, schools and offices, reducing transfers and wasted capacity. The result is a transit system that behaves less like static infrastructure and more like a responsive service.

Many social benefit systems are designed to prevent fraud and maintain integrity, which can unintentionally create barriers for eligible families—such as complex paperwork and burdensome proof requirements. As a result, eligible families are often missed, deterred by paperwork, complexity or the burden of proving they qualify.

New Jersey’s Office of Innovation is developed a process to identify eligible students, iteratively refining a machine learning model to comb through multiple datasets to find eligible children who qualify while eliminating duplicates. In 2024–25, the state automatically enrolled eligible children into a federal benefits programme, indentifying nearly 100,000 additional children and delivering approximately $24 million in benefits to families. By securely linking existing data from programmes such as SNAP and Medicaid, the system flips from “prove you qualify” to “we can identify more who qualify,” cutting paperwork and reducing barriers. It’s a radical example of inclusion-first AI use.

How else could public services reach more people simply by using tech to identify eligible people first?

In 1900, there were 500,000 rhinos worldwide. Today, there are roughly 27,000. The decline is largely the result of poaching and illegal trade.

In South Africa, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand are testing a breakthrough that could change how wildlife trafficking is stopped. Supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Rhisotope Project uses tiny, harmless radioactive markers placed inside rhino horns. These markers don’t affect the animals but they do make the horns instantly detectable by radiation scanners already in use at borders, ports, and airports.

The impact is powerful: trafficked horns become almost impossible to move undetected, turning existing border infrastructure into a global anti-poaching system. Field trials in 2024 with 20 rhinos confirmed the method is safe, and conservation authorities are now being urged to adopt it more widely.

By repurposing nuclear technology for conservation, the project shows how tools from unexpected fields can close long exploited gaps — not just for rhinos but for wildlife trafficking worldwide. What other conservation breakthroughs are waiting to be found outside the usual toolkit?

Oil spill responses are usually expert-led, equipment-heavy and slow to mobilise. In the critical early days, delays can allow damage to spread far beyond the original site.

After a major oil spill off Peru’s coast in 2022, authorities supported an unusually simple response: collecting human hair to absorb the polluting oil. Citizens across Lima were asked to donate hair, which was woven into mats capable of soaking up oil from contaminated shorelines and waters. Hair salons, barbers and individuals quickly took part, turning everyday waste into a practical cleanup tool. Human hair can absorb up to five times its weight in oil, and mats were produced and deployed within days, complementing conventional equipment rather than replacing it. Beyond speed and cost, the approach narrowed the gap between citizens and environmental response: people did not just observe the cleanup, they materially contributed to it.

About a fifth of food produced for people is never eaten. Instead, it often ends up in landfill, where it sits for decades and drives emissions.

BillionCarbon offers a radically different approach, using black soldier fly larvae to break down food waste quickly and efficiently. Food scraps are fed into controlled containers where the larvae consume almost all of it — reducing waste by up to 95% in just three days. What’s left over isn’t trash but value: organic fertiliser and protein-rich insect feed that can be reused elsewhere in the economy.

By turning food waste into a biological cycle rather than a disposal problem, BillionCarbon is reframing how waste can work. In early 2024, the startup joined Accelerating Asia, in partnership with UN ESCAP, to help scale the model.

Ethiopia has long relied on imported fuel, spending roughly $4.5bn a year on it. The dependence drove high prices, long petrol queues and proved unsustainable economically, becoming one of the country’s main expenditures.

In 2024, Ethiopia’s Transport and Logistics Ministry did something no other country had attempted. Instead of subsiding alternatives or gently nudging consumers towards electric vehicles, Ethiopia banned the import of petrol and diesel cars outright. It’s a bold move in a country where EVs were rare before 2024 and electricity access remains limited. The approach aims to harness Ethiopia’s vast hydropower potential to cut its fuel import bill, strengthen the economy and accelerate a greener future.

The effects have been rapid. While Ethiopia’s economy grew by 70%, imports of oil and gas products have been flat since 2019. By late 2025, more than 115,000 electric vehicles were on the roads of Addis Ababa alone and the ban has since been extended to fuel-powered trucks.

Significant challenges remain — from grid capacity to affordability — but the direction of travel is unmistakable. Most countries are trying to manage the future by easing into it. Ethiopia removed one future entirely. Bans are politically risky and economically disruptive — but in a world running out of time, Ethiopia is testing a question others have avoided: what if moving fast means banning, not nudging?

Freetown in Sierra Leone has faced devastating landslides driven by deforestation and heavy rain, making the planting and maintenance of urban trees critical.

In many cities, trees are planted and left to survive or fail. Freetown is taking a different approach. Through its ‘Freetown the Treetown’ initiative, launched in 2020, the city pays residents to plant and maintain trees across vulnerable neighbourhoods, supporting reforestation with local employment. Residents use a mobile platform to geotag trees and verify survival over time, with payments only released when trees are alive and growing. By linking livelihoods, climate adaptation and digital verification, the programme shifts tree planting from volunteerism to paid stewardship, treating trees as living assets that require care, rather than one-off projects. What’s more, Freetown’s model is self-financing: they sell ‘tree tokens’ as carbon offsets to corporations with corporate responsibility targets. By 2030, the goal is 5 million trees planted.

What if climate infrastructure worked by paying people to care for it — creating jobs at the same time?

Tracking animal biodiversity across large and remote areas is difficult, slow and expensive. Conservation agencies rely on tools like field surveys and camera traps, which require significant time, funding and human access — yet regular monitoring is essential for understanding ecosystem health and guiding conservation decisions.

A team of American and Chinese researchers has shown that biodiversity data can be collected using an unlikely ally — blood-feeding leeches. Common in southwest China, leeches retain the DNA of the animals they feed on for months, allowing scientists to identify which species live in an area without direct observation.

In one study, park rangers collected over 30,000 leeches in the Ailaoshan National Nature Reserve in Yunnan. DNA analysis revealed mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, including elusive species that are hard to monitor through traditional methods. Faster and more cost-effective than surveys or camera traps, this approach could help governments monitor ecosystems more consistently.

Tourism is the backbone of Palau’s economy, but it also puts intense pressure on the island nation’s fragile ecosystems. Coral reefs, marine life and coastal environments have been damaged by litter, reef contact and unsustainable visitor behaviour, stretching the country’s limited capacity for enforcement.

In 2017, Palau responded with a different idea: redesigning the moment of entry itself. Through the Palau Pledge, every visitor is required to sign an environmental commitment stamped directly into their passport, promising to protect the natural environment and respect Palauan culture and traditions. Rather than relying on fines or policing, the pledge appeals to personal responsibility and positions visitors as temporary custodians of the islands they are entering. To date, over one million pledges have been signed, contributing to tangible outcomes such as a 50% reduction in single-use plastics nationwide. Palau’s high-value, low-impact tourism model has since inspired similar initiatives in places including New Zealand and Hawaii.

What if environmental regulation began with a promise made at the border?

Ciudad Dulce Curridabat introduces a revolutionary approach to urban development — shifting the focus from traditional economic growth metrics like GDP to a measure rooted in biodiversity, empathy and shared well-being. This initiative reimagines the city as an interconnected system where all inhabitants, human and non-human, are active participants, and what it might mean to radically shift governance systems and projects to reflect this.

By assessing progress through biodiversity indicators — such as the return of bees, hummingbirds and butterflies — and fostering community engagement in caring for local ecosystems, the city moves toward a model that emphasises “sweetness,” empathy and holistic health. This approach is innovative because it decentralises development metrics, integrating ecological and social well-being as foundational goals rather than secondary outcomes.

This shift in the city’s governance mindset is reflected in many different programmes – an example of this is the city government started reframing procurement through an experience lens rather than a problem solving one — instead of calling for proposals to improve water and sanitation, proposals were invited to improve the experience of a drop of water. This meant projects that were holistic and creative in their approach, tackling multiple problems by tracking an experience of a human or non-human citizen from beginning to end.

80,000 people directly benefited from this program, with results including reduced emissions and waste. Additionally, nearly 3,000 people visited recreational venues in underprivileged communities weekly.

Public investment in cities often follows wealth, not need. The result is a familiar pattern: deprived neighbourhoods receive small, fragmented upgrades, while the highest-quality public spaces cluster in already affluent areas.

In Mexico City, local government chose to reverse that logic. Through UTOPÍAS (Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social), the municipality has built a network of large-scale, free community hubs in one of the city’s most densely populated and historically underserved areas. The programme has delivered more than a dozen major complexes combining sports, culture, education, childcare, health services and green space. Many facilities include Olympic-size swimming pools, climbing walls, libraries, concert halls and wellness centres — deliberately matching or exceeding amenities found in wealthier districts. By concentrating high-quality social infrastructure where need is greatest, UTOPÍAS reframes public space as a right rather than a reward.

Underground pipes, cables and networks are essential urban infrastructure, yet they are often poorly mapped and fragmented, creating hidden risks. Making these systems visible improves safety, coordination and long-term planning.

In Wellington, missing or inaccurate underground data meant nearly half of contractors hit unexpected pipes, costing the city around $50 million a year. The city responded by creating the Underground Asset Register (UAR): a single shared digital map of underground infrastructure. By forming agreements with all utility owners based on data standards and key security protections, the UAR has aligned utilities and government around one source of truth.

What other invisible systems shape our cities — and what could change if we started designing with them in mind?

Modern life runs on software, from pacemakers to weapons systems. When those systems are compromised, the damage can last far beyond the initial breach. Cyberattacks don’t just disrupt services for minutes or hours; they can leave systems broken for years, with fixes too complex, risky or slow to deploy. In critical domains like healthcare or defence, those delays can cost lives.

URSA Inc., a small business supported by DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research programme, is testing a radically different approach. Instead of treating cyber defence as detection followed by human-led repair, URSA is building systems that heal themselves.

Using a pacemaker simulator, the team demonstrated that its tool, Cyber First Aid, can detect a vulnerability, generate a software fix using a large language model, verify that fix in a safe environment, and deploy it — all in under 16 seconds. No human intervention. No waiting for patches. The system doesn’t just respond; it adapts. Like a biological immune system, it learns from each attack, strengthening itself over time. The technology is still at an early stage, with major technical hurdles ahead and millisecond response times as the long-term goal. But the capability it points to is unprecedented: software that senses an attack, diagnoses the failure, creates a bespoke repair, tests it safely, and installs the fix automatically.

If cyber security has long been about building stronger walls, Cyber First Aid hints at something more radical — a future where critical systems recover from attacks almost as fast as they’re hit.

Public institutions often rely on polished campaigns to persuade people to act. For younger, digitally native audiences, that approach can feel distant or untrustworthy — especially when the stakes are high.

The US Army Recruiting Command tested a different strategy by meeting people on Reddit, a platform known for candid, peer-led discussion. Instead of running ads, recruiters embedded themselves in relevant subreddits, answering questions anonymously, correcting misinformation and explaining enlistment in plain language — including pay, risks, benefits and career paths. The goal was not to target active applicants, but to engage people who were simply curious. By respecting Reddit’s culture and listening first, recruiters created space for honest conversation and reached audiences traditional campaigns often miss. Trust was built through presence, not persuasion.

Across West Africa, formal education often fails to translate into livelihoods, as training systems remain poorly aligned with local economies and informal work. Kabakoo addresses this through The Highdigenous Engine, a new, scalable, and replicable operating system designed to unlock the productive potential of youth within the world’s informal economies.

“Highdigenous” is the intentional fusion of accessible emerging technologies (high-tech) with deep local and cultural insights (indigenous knowledge). This approach rejects the false binary between “modern” and “traditional,” instead creating learning experiences that are both cutting-edge and deeply relevant to the learner's lived reality.

In Bamako, they created the world's first exploration of AI & Radical Care through interactive installations that attracted hundreds of participants. “Sound Cares” used AI to create personalized healing soundscapes based on emotional states, with 89% reporting feeling calmer. These interactive, highly visual experiences exemplify how the Highdigenous Engine makes abstract concepts tangible and engaging.

Kabakoo tracks impact through rigorous data and learning loops. Eighteen months after training, learners earn on average 71% more than control groups, with many increasing income by three to eight times. Over 71% aim to run formal businesses within 10 years — raising a broader question: what could education unlock if technology consistently amplified, rather than replaced, community knowledge?

Zimbabwe faces a severe shortage of mental health services, with just one mental health professional for every 1.5 million people. In response, an unconventional solution emerged: the Friendship Bench, where trained grandmothers provide basic problem-solving therapy on wooden benches in local neighbourhoods. They deliver the talk therapy intervention to people with common, but mild to moderate level, mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, known locally as ‘kufungisisa’- thinking too much. They sit with their clients outdoors, under the trees on wooden park benches in discreet safe spaces in the community. During training, a referral pathway is established for cases which are considered ‘red flags’ where a higher level of care is needed.

The programme uses the trusted social role of grandmothers and culturally familiar language, rather than clinical or Western medical terms. By moving mental health support out of clinics and into everyday community spaces, the Friendship Bench treats care as part of daily life rather than a specialised service. It now partners with Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation, and has reached over 1,000,000 people through its community-based mental health intervention. More than 3,000 community health workers have been trained to deliver support. It is active in over 300 primary health care facilities, and has established 919 peer-led support groups, reporting a 78% reduction in depression and suicidal ideation among participants.

Recognised by the World Happiness Report 2025 as one of the most effective mental health interventions, the model is now being adopted internationally in 12 countries including El Salvador, USA, Malawi, Zambia, Colombia, Vietnam and Jordan. With the programme’s scalability and adaptability established, it raises the question of how community-based care could reshape mental health systems elsewhere.

In Vancouver, new housing towers stood half-empty, emergency calls from high-rise buildings were rising, and community centres saw participation fall even as populations grew. These patterns remained unconnected until the Hey Neighbor Collective brought together departments that rarely worked together.

The Hey Neighbour Collective was created to change this by treating housing as social infrastructure, not just shelter. It brings together housing providers, non-profits, researchers, health authorities, local governments, and residents to test practical ways of building connection in multi-unit buildings. The focus is not only on activities, but on shifting mindsets (seeing apartment buildings as vibrant, neighbourly places), relationships (between neighbours and property managers), and everyday practices (how buildings are managed and lived in).

Through pilots, partners co-designed simple, repeatable social programmes — such as shared meals, lobby gatherings and welcome rituals — that fit naturally into daily life. These activities helped shift towers from temporary housing into places of belonging: 70–90% of participating residents reported a stronger sense of belonging, and around 70% said they were more likely to ask neighbours for support. By acting across culture, relationships, practice, and policy at the same time, the Hey Neighbour Collective shows how addressing loneliness requires more than services — it requires changing how places are designed, managed and experienced. What if we didn't ask what’s in your emergency toolkit, but who is in your emergency toolkit?

When a disaster strikes, how quickly help arrives can be critical. In the Philippines, typhoons, floods and earthquakes regularly cut off roads, power and communications, leaving communities isolated when help is most urgent.

Bike Scouts emerged as a grassroots response to this gap. Built around bicycles, mobile phones and local coordination, the volunteer-led network uses lightweight mobility to reach areas inaccessible to vehicles, often becoming first responders when official aid is delayed. Today, Bike Scouts has over 100,000 members nationwide. In response to a crisis, volunteers provide last-mile access by bike, relay real-time information, and support emergency communications and power using portable solar kits. The network has supported responses to major events, including the 6.9-magnitude earthquake in Cebu and multiple typhoons across the Philippines in late 2024. Bike Scouts shows how resilience can exist before infrastructure arrives — embedded in communities themselves.

In many labour markets, jobs and workers exist side by side but remain invisible to each other. In India, over 80% of jobs are advertised offline — on walls, trees and WhatsApp groups — making hiring slow, costly and unreliable. Filling a role can take 6–12 weeks, with sourcing costs often exceeding ₹1000 per candidate.

Built on India’s open employment protocol ONEST, the Blue Dot Project, developed by the EkStep Foundation, treats jobs as spatial infrastructure. Workers, employers and training institutes appear as verified digital ‘blue dots’ on a live map, making opportunities easy to discover locally. Job seekers can create profiles using simple voice tools, without needing a CV or a complex app, while local institutions help verify listings. In early pilots, hiring time dropped to under 24 hours, and sourcing costs fell by 90%, from ₹1,000 to ₹100 per hire. At scale, India alone could unlock USD 5.4 billion in hiring efficiency, with interest emerging from Brazil, Kenya and South Africa.

By making jobs visible, local and easy to find, the Blue Dot Project turns fragmented labour markets into functioning ones. It cuts time and cost for employers, expands access for workers without formal credentials and helps local economies move faster. At scale, this kind of infrastructure doesn’t just improve hiring, it reshapes how opportunity flows.

Governments often struggle to attract high-performing talent. For many professionals, joining the state can feel like a career risk rather than an opportunity to build impact.

Lithuania chose to redesign the offer. Through Kurk Lietuvai (Create Lithuania), the government recruits competitive cohorts of local and international professionals for one-year, mission-driven placements inside ministries and public agencies. Instead of lifetime roles, participants are embedded to solve concrete problems — from digital transformation and economic reform to climate policy and public-sector innovation. The programme lowers the commitment barrier while raising ambition, treating government as a place to build and deliver, not just administer. Alumni form a growing talent flywheel, with many moving into senior public roles-including minister roles, startups and international organisations. Kurk Lietuvai has become a flagship model for renewing public-sector capability in Central and Eastern Europe.

Across Africa, youth unemployment remains high. At the same time, global demand for AI and data skills is accelerating.

While many frame African talent as a skills deficit to fix, Zindi takes an alternative view. To them, AI talent is a distributed resource to activate. What’s missing is access, exposure and real problems to solve. So, instead of recruitment drives or training programmes, Zindi runs open data science competitions tied to public-interest challenges, in partnership with governments, startups, NGOs and universities. Participants learn by solving live problems, which can lead directly to hiring opportunities. In a partnership with the Kenyan Presidency, Zindi conducted research that showed that by solving real world challenges, nearly 1 in 5 users (approximately 1,500 individuals) experienced a career advancement.

By late 2025, Zindi’s community included over 90,000 data scientists and AI practitioners across 185 countries. By opening access to real problems, Zindi is building an alternative talent pipeline — one that treats AI capability as public infrastructure, not elite expertise.

What if China tried to build a “second Hong Kong” from scratch, on an island?

Hainan has just flipped a switch that turns the entire province into a sealed free trade territory, legally separate from the mainland: goods made there with enough local value can now flow tariff-free into China, foreign firms can enter service sectors normally off limits, and new tax and regulatory freedoms suddenly apply at full scale. It’s an island-wide customs experiment worth $113 billion, positioned as both a stress test for deeper market reforms and a signal to the world that China wants back in the conversation on high-standard trade.

What makes Hainan notable is how explicitly it is designed for learning. By containing major reforms within a defined place, China is testing how open a system can be — and how it can be governed — before scaling those rules more widely. If successful, Hainan points to a different way of experimenting with economic policy: treating a place itself as a sandbox where regulation, markets, and institutions can be tested together, not in theory, but in practice.

Local governments often rely on short-term pilots or external consultants to innovate. These efforts can produce ideas, but rarely build lasting capacity inside city hall, especially in smaller or lower-income municipalities.

In Renca, a working-class municipality in Chile, the city government took a different approach — it repurposed an abandoned supermarket into La Fábrica de Renca. La Fábrica de Renca is an in-house innovation ‘factory’ designed to systematically turn frontline problems into tested solutions. The institution is, first and foremost, geared at connecting the city with the business community in a more systematic way. Where the city might previously have sought one-off engagements with companies that, in the end, represented drops in the bucket of local need, La Fábrica works with universities to produce the research needed to make the case for major corporate investment.

La Fábrica gets involved in virtually every major challenge the city tackles, joining Monday “summit” meetings alongside department heads in city hall. La Fábrica has so far helped the city secure $22 million in corporate investment for local improvements, including nearly 500 acres of new parks. It has also supported the rollout of a new fleet of electric buses and initiatives such as a digital skills-building program for youth while securing millions of dollars for additional infrastructure projects in the years ahead.

Large language models are built with safety guardrails to prevent harmful use. Jailbreaks are techniques used by attackers to circumvent them.

In 2024, researchers at DexAI, Sapienza University of Rome and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies tested those guardrails in an unconventional way, setting aside complex technical jailbreaks and instead experimenting with using poetry. The team wrote 1,200 harmful prompts as poems and tested them on 25 LLMs across nine companies. Concerningly, models struggled to detect intent hidden in the creative, unpredictable verse. They responded to 62% of the poetic prompts — generating harmful content ranging from weapon-making to hate speech. The researchers then replicated the experiment with fairy tales finding similar results.

Researchers are now working with Italy’s cybersecurity agency to develop AI’s defences to poetry — because if attackers can come with verse, not code, future attacks may be accessible to anyone, not just technical experts. What if more governments tested AI systems in unconventional ways?

Governments have largely focused on making social media safer for children, through content moderation, education and parental controls. Australia took a more structural approach: changing who is allowed to be there at all.

In late 2024, Australia passed world-first legislation requiring social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from holding accounts, with the law coming into effect on 10 December 2025. Responsibility for enforcement sits with platforms rather than children or parents, pushing companies to develop age-assurance systems while raising new questions about privacy, verification and platform design. The move reframes digital childhood as something to be protected by default, not managed through individual resilience alone. It also marks a shift in governance: treating social media less like a consumer product and more like a regulated environment.

Justice delayed is justice denied. India’s judicial system faces a backlog of over 50 million cases, with an average resolution time of 13.5 years. As a result, justice often becomes a decades-long process, sometimes outlasting victims and witnesses. It would take over 300 years to clear the existing backlog in courts. The impact is weakened accountability and declining trust in the rule of law.

To address this, Adalat AI, a non-profit providing free technology to courts, streamlines case management by transcribing arguments, orders and judgments in real time, cutting tasks from minutes to seconds. It focuses on the inefficiencies that plague courtrooms, particularly those linked to heavy paperwork and shortages of key resources such as stenographers.

The platform is already deployed across 4,000+ courtrooms in 9 Indian states and is now expanding to Africa.

Justice systems generate vast amounts of information about violence, but most of it remains locked inside court files and PDF judgments. As a result, patterns of escalation are recorded only after harm has already occurred.

In Argentina, AymurAI explores a different role for the courts: prevention through learning. Developed by Data Género, the open-source AI tool analyses criminal court rulings on gender-based violence, using natural language processing to extract key patterns while automatically anonymising sensitive data. By turning judgments into structured, analysable information, AymurAI helps identify trajectories of escalation that can precede femicide. Piloted in Buenos Aires Criminal Court No. 10 and recognised by UNESCO, the tool is designed to be replicated across Latin America as digital public infrastructure. The shift is subtle but significant: courts move from being endpoints of violence to early-warning systems within it.

Cities are dynamic yet the rules that govern them often aren’t. Rigid zoning, licensing and complex permissions processes leave spaces unused, keep needs unmet and diminish urban vibrancy.

In 2024, Daegu Metropolitan City, the National ICT Promotion Agency and Dark Matter Labs launched a pilot project empowering citizens to bring vacant buildings to life. Re:permissioning the City integrates real-time IoT data, open digital architecture and peer-to-peer verification to remove bureaucracy from permissions processes, shifting decisions about public space into community hands.

Residents can easily request to use public spaces for activities ranging from pop-up restaurants on abandoned rooftops to community gardens in disused car parks and vote on the rules. It’s a bold shift from bureaucratic enforcement to shared stewardship. Trials already point to lower operational costs, faster permissions, more active spaces and reduced crime. It’s also being explored in the UK. How else might urban life change if bureaucracy stepped aside and communities governed space in real time?

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) was established to embed innovation at the heart of the UAE Government, in line with the vision of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The Centre develops innovation capabilities, inspires possibilities, and celebrates achievements and lessons learned, positioning the UAE Government among the most innovative globally. Its mission revolves around three main pillars: innovation enablers, innovation possibilities, and innovation platforms. Through collaboration across the ecosystem, MBRCGI fosters a culture where innovation becomes a daily practice, advancing public sector innovation and strengthening the UAE’s position as a global innovation hub.

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