Levers for Change, an affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has announced a $10 million competition for bold solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the building, transportation, or industrial sectors.
According to the organizers, the “vast majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from a small set of countries and sectors. In fact, only 20 countries produce 75 percent of GHG emissions, and three-fourths of GHG emissions land in four energy sectors: electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry.” Of those 20 countries, U.S. has “historically been the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter and currently has the second highest amount of emissions in the world.”
Levers for Change sees the U.S. building, transportation, and industrial sectors as critical in the global fight against climate change. “If the U.S. decarbonizes at scale in the next ten years –i.e. by 2030—then we have a chance to land at a decent future. Failure in the U.S. almost guarantees global failure.”
The competition organizers provide an organizational readiness tool that enables those interested to find out if they meet the criteria. Registrations are due July 23 and submissions are due August 20.
Another opportunity worth exploring: the McEwan School of Architecture in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has announced an ideas competition for revitalizing the urban core. The city, which has a population of 160,000, has hundreds of lakes and becomes a sports mecca in winter, with a 1.5-mile-long ice skating path.
The city occupies the crater of a meteorite that hit 1.8 billion years ago and left large deposits of copper, gold, platinum, palladium, and nickel. As a result, Sudbury is known as the “nickel capital of the world.” The goal is transform a mining city for the next generation of digital workers.
