UN to organise ‘Reboot the Earth’ in Gurugram to resolve climate crisis

GURUGRAM:  United Nations would be organising a social encoding competition with the ongoing climate crisis as the theme in 5 major cities of the world, with Gurugram being one of the cities amongst New York, Helsinki, Cairo and Kuala Lumpur.

The purpose of the challenge is to look for ways to solve a local climate crisis by building new software or improving upon an older one. As per officials, this could translate to improve technology currently available to resolve the ongoing climate crisis. The event in Gurugram will be organised by the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs (UNTIL) and the Haryana State Electronics Department Corporation Ltd (HARTRON) at the UNTIL campus in Udyog Vihar and would be open for attendance for students, scientists and social entrepreneurs up to the age of 35.

The event is named ‘Reboot the Earth’ and would be held on August 18 and 19, in the city, and the registrations for the same began last week. The winning team from the city would be presenting their solution to the UN headquarters in New York this September and would also have an opportunity to be incubated at the UN Technology Innovation Labs, which recently began operations at Gurugram’s Udyog Vihar.

“Program developers can help provide solutions to help fight the climate crisis by developing interactive tools and information-sharing platforms,” said Chand Kaushil from the UN’s Office of Information and Communication Technology (OICT), adding that the idea is to find how new-age innovations can help challenge environmental issues. “For example, at a coding challenge that took place in Switzerland some time back, a team came up with the idea of involving marine drones to clear out plastic from the oceans,” Kaushil said. The solution for the upcoming challenge, he added, can pertain to problems more relevant to the Indian subcontinent such as air pollution, deforestation etc.