Deadline: 30-Aug-21
Applications are now open for the Climate Innovation Challenge to crowdsource innovative and disruptive technology solutions from around the world for resilience in South Asia.
Through grant awards, matchmaking and pilot-testing, CIC will facilitate innovations across different sectors at national, sub-national and local/community levels in the region.
Facilitating innovators to deploy technology and innovative solutions to enhance climate adaptation across different sectors and levels is part of a 5-year project called “Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CARE) for South Asia.” The project is a partnership between ADPC, Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (RIMES), and the World Bank to support informed decision-making for protecting development gains in the region.
The project aims to create an enabling environment for climate resilience in the region, focusing on Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan by improving the availability of regional data and knowledge, developing guidelines, tools, and capacities, and promoting climate-resilient decisions, policies, and investments across key sectors.
Thematic Areas
- Climate Information and Analytics: South Asian countries are seeking solutions that would combine weather-related data to generate understandable and usable information for policy interventions in specific sectors, such as food security, nutrition, forests and watersheds, livelihoods and resilient infrastructure needs, at local level.
- Community-level Early-warning System: Early warnings on climate change impact which includes slow onset changes and shifts in climate such as precipitation and temperature patterns, as well as degradation in ecosystem and resource quality, is rarely understood, collected or shared with communities.
- Climate-smart Agriculture: Countries are seeking solutions to make agroforestry, agriculture and aquaculture more resilient to the deleterious effects of climate change while trying to promote adaptations that enhance food and nutrition security while protecting the environment.
- Integrated Water Resource Management: In most countries, climate change leads to both an increased flood risk and an increasing prevalence of drought. Basic systems for watershed protection, water management, flood management will be required to make countries and communities more resilient.
- Resilient Infrastructure (transport and power): There is an equal need to build infrastructure that is more resilient and can withstand the increasing frequency of these events. For example, in the immediate aftermath of a climate event, emergency operations are often hampered by a lack of resilient infrastructure.
- Nature-based solutions for adaptation: There is a demand and a definitive need for strengthening science and technology innovation and cooperation in the areas of nature-based solutions; innovation in climate and disaster-resilient infrastructures and nature-based solutions (NbS) to protect and restore critical infrastructures and ecosystems, assessments and monitoring systems.
- Risk Financing Solutions: As climate change impact on multiple sectors at a regional as well as country and community levels increase, economic losses have undermined development outcomes annually.
Funding Information
- The Program for Asia Resilience to Climate Change, a trust fund administered by the World Bank and funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), has made US$3.5 million available to ADPC to identify and pilot innovations to reduce climate risk and build climate resilience of communities vulnerable to such risks and extremes.
- The Call for Proposals is now open to eligible innovators. Each winning innovator would have access to a maximum of US$150,000 to pilot their innovations at the regional or national level over a period of 12 months.
Eligibility Criteria
CIC is open to any firm or organization operating lawfully in any country or territory with experience in deploying solutions in low-income or developing countries. Each eligible and winning innovator would have access to a maximum of US$150,000 to pilot their innovations at regional or national level over a period of 12 months.
- Any firm or organization operating lawfully in any country or territory with experience in deploying solutions in low-income or developing countries can apply.
- Provide experience of deploying such a technology or solution as above in any SAR country.
- Any formal consortium where two or more entities have come together to constitute a new organization is eligible to apply.
- Privately-owned companies including those with experience in providing innovative climate resilient technology solutions in the South Asia region.
- The companies or organizations to have demonstrated managerial capacity to implement the proposed solutions.
- The solutions are preferably a Minimum Viable Product/prototype (MVP) that may have been deployed with test results and status.
- The proposed solutions to have potential of scalability and replicability under local conditions in the South Asia region.
For more information, visit https://www.adpc.net/cic/
