UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) announced earlier this week the winners of the inaugural year of Climate Call, an AI-enabled platform (powered by Swae) dedicated to empowering young voices in climate action, especially those from marginalised communities.

At the Grand Finale attended by UICCA’s President and CEO, Her Highness Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, three winners were awarded for their category-leading ideas:

Her Highness Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, President and CEO of UICCA, said, “Climate Call began as a simple question: how can we use AI to make climate conversations more accessible and inclusive. Fast forward to today and we have three stand-out concepts developed by talented young people, each with great potential for tangible positive impact on our world. The quality of practical, grassroots solutions that this initiative has brought to light demonstrates the importance of giving a voice to youth in the climate debate. Together, we must find more ways of enabling communities from all backgrounds and ages to develop their own ideas to tackle the climate crisis.”

The grand finale featured presentations from the finalists, with a panel of distinguished judges selecting one winner per challenge category. The expert panel included Dr. Afkar Hilles, Food Security Expert from the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA); Eng. Athbeh Hamdan AlShehhi, Senior Engineer of Climate Change and Sustainability at Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA); and Angela Homsi, Founder and President of Ignite Power.

In her remarks, as an expert judge for the Food Security challenge, Dr. Afkar Hilles stated, “Our global food system lies at the heart of the climate crisis. From agricultural practices to food waste, the industry has a substantial impact on the planet’s ecosystems, and the solutions presented here highlight the urgency of change. What we need now are bold, scalable innovations to transform how we grow, process, and distribute food. Each finalist has brought forward solutions that not only reduce environmental impact but also enhance food security, strengthen communities, and foster resilience in the face of climate adversity.”  

Climate Call offered young participants a collaborative space to propose, evaluate, and develop their ideas. In line with UICCA’s commitment, the winners have each received an award of AED 25,000 per winner project in each challenge category, and their stories featured on The Climate Tribe storytelling platform.

Climate Call is UICCA’s grassroots legacy project from COP28, aligned with the UAE’s commitment to host the most inclusive COP ever held to place both people and planet at the heart of the climate process. Climate Call generated hundreds of innovative ideas from across the globe.

The UICCA

The UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is a non-partisan, climate action entity that has a mandate to bring together members of the public and private sector, including academic institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to drive the UAE’s commitment towards net zero by 2050. In the lead-up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), the UICCA was mandated with establishing an independent body to advise COP on collaboration, cooperation and innovation. Climatecall.com is one example of direct innovation towards useful solutions and recommendations to decision-makers. Outside of this example, the UICCA operates as a think tank, and advisory resource, providing advice and recommendations to a range of stakeholders on positive climate action that facilitates the transition to a green economy. Included in its mandate, the UICCA facilitates international business, innovation and technology partnerships that work towards the common goal of tackling climate change.

Swae

Swae is a platform for organization-wide ideation, crowdsourcing, and decision-making.  Swae’s AI and bottom-up collaborative features encourage users to contribute ideas to improve any organization or suggest solutions to emerging and topical challenges. The best and most debated ideas bubble up to a review by management automatically. Decisions are made on the platform ensuring a strong feedback loop, reinforcing trust, transparency, and engagement. 

With over 50,000 users, Swae creates a secure, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem-solving within organizations, enabling leaders to tap into their workforce’s creativity to address pressing challenges and improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients like the United Nations, Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others.

More to explore…

The world today is facing three planetary crises: climate change, biodiversity loss and unmanageable amounts of pollution, stemming from an economic growth model unfit for our planetary boundaries. Each crisis has its own causes, symptoms and solutions, but finding solutions to each that are scalable, globally relevant, and adequately address all three simultaneously with the urgency required, is an overwhelming challenge.  While it may be unrealistic to imagine a single solution or “silver bullet” will solve the climate crisis, we must nevertheless all lean-in to imagine different ways forward and collaborate with one another to find the macro and micro-solutions that fit together to unlock progress for all of our benefits.

To that end, earlier in June 2023, Swae partnered with the UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) to launch ClimateCall.com, an open-to-all interactive platform to empower new and unheard voices – particularly young people and citizens of the Global South – to propose innovative climate action ideas to decision-makers in the lead up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), being held in Dubai later in November 2023. 

Climatecall.com is an open problem-solving platform designed to crowdsource and accelerate innovative climate action ideas from around the world. The platform facilitates everyday citizens, especially young people, and communities who will be the most urgently affected by climate change around the world to propose new solutions in three climate challenge areas: Food Security, Water Scarcity, and Renewable Energy.

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

The UICCA

The UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is a non-partisan, climate action entity that has a mandate to bring together members of the public and private sector, including academic institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to drive the UAE’s commitment towards net zero by 2050. In the lead-up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), the UICCA was mandated with establishing an independent body to advise COP on collaboration, cooperation and innovation. Climatecall.com is one example of direct innovation towards useful solutions and recommendations to decision-makers. Outside of this example, the UICCA operates as a think tank, and advisory resource, providing advice and recommendations to a range of stakeholders on positive climate action that facilitates the transition to a green economy. Included in its mandate, the UICCA facilitates international business, innovation and technology partnerships that work towards the common goal of tackling climate change.

Swae

Swae is a platform for organization-wide ideation, crowdsourcing, and decision-making.  Swae’s AI and bottom-up collaborative features encourage users to contribute ideas to improve any organization or suggest solutions to emerging and topical challenges. The best and most debated ideas bubble up to a review by management automatically. Decisions are made on the platform ensuring a strong feedback loop, reinforcing trust, transparency, and engagement. 

With over 50,000 users, Swae creates a secure, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem-solving within organizations, enabling leaders to tap into their workforce’s creativity to address pressing challenges and improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients like the United Nations, Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others.

More to explore…

Announcement

We’re excited to announce our first flagship partnership and upcoming proof-of-concept with Etihad Aviation Group. Together, we plan to deploy Swae’s platform company-wide to help improve the inclusivity and quality of bottom-up ideas generated and the employee-led innovation process. Through the proof of concept, Etihad aims to leverage Swae’s platform, our methodology, and AI tools to help take employee ideas to the next level, to influence the broader strategic direction of the organization.

Backstory

This partnership has been a work-in-progress for several months now. Our teams first met while participating in NYU Abu Dhabi’s StartAD Venture Launchpad program in April 2018. Thanks to NYUAD’s stewardship, they brokered a handful of such opportunities to allow start-ups like us to explore different applications of our platform within operations of established companies.

Deployment and Potential Impact

Etihad Airways is undergoing a subtle, yet very exciting transformation. Having welcomed a new CEO, they are preparing to become more organizationally nimble, adept, customer-centric, and more technologically driven in order to insulate against the general challenging trends facing the global airline industry. Moments like this offer unique opportunities to introduce new ideas, processes, policies and infrastructure to help sustain a shift in the orientation and trajectory of the organization for long-term competitiveness, prosperity and future-compatibility. Our partnership comes at a pivotal time, one in which we’re excited to explore the different ways in which Swae can support Etihad Aviation Group’s growth and adaptation.

Though specific details about the proof of concept are still being finalised (and cannot yet disclosed), kick off is expected in early 2019. We wanted to share this news with our community and supporters, as you watch us grow and test Swae’s platform, technology and operational capabilities while deploying in an organization of 15,000+ people. For us, the volume and diversity of ideas and decisions generated by the pilot will help us improve our systems and processes, calibrate our tools, and have real world learning to apply to more public facing experiments and applications.

Next Steps

2019 is already shaping up to be a great year, with a few other pilots expected to deploy early in the year. One we are in discussions with is a Smart City looking to deploy Swae’s platform for a large participatory budgeting / citizen policy creation experiment. Watch this space as we share more news about this pilot and the other experiments in our pipeline soon.