Projects
Seven areasworth building.
Starting points, not assignments. The real projects get shaped at the kickoff by the teams doing the work.
Each area names what the work is and what could realistically come out of it. Some of it is already under way in Nepal.
- 01
Alert and monitoring
The signals mostly exist already — weather and melt anomalies, snow loss, river gauges, remote sensing — but they sit in separate systems and nobody has put them together. Combine them and test whether they flag dangerous conditions earlier than what is in place today.
Weekend outputBacktest a recent event and prototype a simple risk score, dashboard or API.
Skills that fit
Data and GIS · Climate science · AI and engineering
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 02
Danger zones
Work out what is actually downstream of an event: settlements, roads, bridges, schools, health facilities, hydropower, trekking routes. Much of it is mapped, but in separate places and at different times, so no one view shows what is at stake.
Weekend outputAn integrated map for one priority area, and a list of the important missing data.
Skills that fit
Data and GIS · Drones and remote sensing · Climate science
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 03
Climate-warming risk
Find where glaciers, glacial lakes, snow cover and terrain are changing fastest, and therefore where closer monitoring is worth the effort. Nepal and ICIMOD hold the expertise and much of the data; outside teams can bring newer imagery and the compute to compare it at scale.
Longer term outputAn updated risk-monitoring layer, or an expert-review watchlist.
Skills that fit
Climate science · Drones and remote sensing · Cloud and compute
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 04
Risk, inequality and development
The same flood does very different damage depending on road access, communications, healthcare and how quickly a community can recover. Census, infrastructure and geographic data already exist to show that — and to show where investment would change the most.
Longer term outputA pilot resilience or investment-priority map for one region.
Skills that fit
Data and GIS · Economics · Product and design
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 05
Drones and remote sensing
Drone teams in Nepal are already flying. The bottleneck is what happens next: turning footage into damage maps, blocked-road assessments and searchable imagery fast enough to matter. That part can be done from anywhere, at scale.
Weekend outputDemonstrate a drone-to-map workflow, and identify the technical, compute or equipment support local operators need.
Skills that fit
Drones and remote sensing · AI and engineering · Cloud and compute
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 06
Public health and continuity of care
A disaster creates injuries and shortages now, and exposes what was already thin: access to healthcare, medicines, water, sanitation and emergency transport. Nepal has strong health-emergency institutions. The work is to add capacity to them, not to stand up something parallel.
Weekend outputSupport an existing Nepal-led coordination effort with a data, matching or visualisation tool — not a parallel system. Or prototype an access and referral layer showing which communities lose trauma, maternal and medicine access when a road, bridge or facility fails.
Skills that fit
Data and GIS · Product and design · AI and engineering
Problem lead announced at kickoff
- 07
Environment, watersheds and recovery
A flood on this scale reshapes rivers, moves enormous volumes of sediment, damages forest and farmland, contaminates water and creates new erosion and landslide risk. How roads, bridges and settlements are rebuilt then either reduces the next one or repeats it.
Longer term outputWork with Nepal-based environmental scientists, engineers and government experts to establish what damage has occurred, what secondary risks follow, and where rebuilding could reduce future risk rather than recreate it.
Skills that fit
Climate science · Data and GIS · Economics
Problem lead announced at kickoff
What is not on this page yet
Each area will eventually carry its own brief: who is already working on it in Nepal, what has been tried, what data exists, current status, and what is needed next. None of that is written yet, because no team has formed and no Nepal-side lead has scoped it.
It gets written at the kickoff, by the people who will own the work. Until then this page says seven things it is confident about rather than seven pages of placeholder.