Innovation Projects run by UN Entities

GRID3 (Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development) works with countries to generate, validate, and use geospatial data on population, settlements, infrastructure, and administrative boundaries to strengthen the foundation for sustainable evidence-based development and humanitarian decision making. The initiative combines the expertise of partners in academia, government, the United Nations, and the private sector to design adaptable and relevant spatial data solutions based on the capacity and development needs of each country. We are mapping a path to sustainable development for everyone!

We have 12 years to act on climate change. But how do we connect people to the urgency of climate change when carbon emissions are invisible? Our virtual reality experience brings people face to face with their carbon footprints. Each tonne of CO2 is a staggering 10 meters high - and the average Thai person has a footprint of 9 tonnes! You can also see your water and material footprints, as well as experience the impacts of our consumption patterns - toxic air pollution, plastic waste, and the carbon footprint of different transport options. But this is only our beta version. Next steps are to refine the storylines, explore with interactive components, and move to the scalable impact of Augmented Reality.

UN Environment Finance Initiative and the Natural Capital Finance Alliance have launched the ENCORE tool, a free online platform that connects nature to economic production. Used by financial institutions, the platform supports enhanced risk management at project, portfolio and strategic level. The platform was created with UNEP-WCMC. https://encore.naturalcapital.finance/en Future iterations of the platform can add natural capital impacts, additional data layers and enhanced analytical capacity.

UN Environment and Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture with the support of UN-Habitat, have teamed up to develop an eco-housing module, to highlight the need for innovation and spark public discussion and new ideas on how sustainable design can provide decent, affordable housing while limiting the overuse of natural resources and climate change. Around one billion people worldwide currently live in informal settlements, while millions more live in buildings that are not environmentally friendly. Rapid urbanization and economic growth challenge communities to sustainably expand capacity, heightening the need for innovation in building systems and infrastructure. Engineered to operate independently, the module’s built-in systems include solar energy generation using less than 1 percent of toxic semiconductor materials, on-site water collection, micro agricultural infrastructure, natural day lighting, plant-based air purification, passive cross-ventilation, and a range of flexible, adaptable components for living and working. The first module has been set up at the High-Level Political Forum in New York in July to show people something which is real, which is concrete and brings home the message that affordable and adequate housing can be done with all environmental features being respected as well. People usually think that environmental features add some cost and therefore cannot be affordable, this project wants to prove this is not true. The second phase of this project includes the design and building of an eco-housing module adapted to the East Africa socio-economic and climatic context. In December, UN Environment and UN-Habitat have again joined hands to organize a participatory workshop under the lead of Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture with representatives from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania Architecture Universities to explore needs and opportunities. Outcomes of this workshop will be presented at the Fourth UN Environment Assembly. It will include an exhibit with real life structures as a way to engage people, and brand it as a ‘collective design’ opportunity as well as a first modelization of the East African Ecological Living Module.

Air quality data in many low and middle-income countries are difficult to acquire and manage. This is because the cost of regulatory grade instruments are prohibitive and equipment are difficult and costly to maintain. UN Environment has advocated for the use of low-cost sensors to fill the data gap and championed the development of an open source air quality monitoring device. UNEP's new air quality monitoring device can spark a data boom to help countries reduce the negative effects of air pollution, potentially saving lives that would have been lost due to air pollution-related illnesses. The device, capable of collecting all the vital parameters of air quality, will cost around $1,500 per unit, allowing governments to establish a countrywide network of mobile and stationary air monitoring stations for as little as $150,000-200,000 (currently, the same amount of money is necessary to set up just one monitoring station). This will allow governments and organizations to assemble or fabricate the units themselves, creating opportunities for innovation, enterprise development and green job creation.

Data has become the world’s most valuable and powerful resource. MapX, a collaboration between the Crisis Management Branch and GRID-Geneva, supports the sustainable use of natural resources by providing access to the best available geospatial data, technology, and monitoring tools. Backed by the impartiality of the UN, MapX is the first non-commercial platform to power a variety of applications and websites with the best available data, working towards establishing a global public good of environmental data. MapX directly contributes to the Secretary General’s innovation vision by offering a geospatial online platform, built on cloud-based architecture and open-source software, that can be freely used, developed and scaled by any stakeholder. MapX offers a fully customizable toolkit for easy data aggregation, visualization, analysis and communication of spatial data. This includes a story mapping engine, dashboards for monitoring indicators, and customizable links for sharing and embedding views through digital media platforms. Since 2015, MapX has engaged with projects in 8 countries and connected stakeholders to over 1100 key datasets.

The UN Biodiversity Lab is a free, open-source mapping platform designed to inform biodiversity conservation and sustainable development decision-making. The lab has directly engaged 170 countries in creating data-driven Sixth National Reports on their progress towards achieving the 2020 Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Thus far, the platform has increased the level of spatial planning and reporting by a factor of 5 (based on reports submitted by December 2018). The UN Biodiversity Lab is a collaboration with UN Environment, UNDP, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Environment Facility. It is powered by MapX.

BioStories is a story-driven investigation adventure game. As a proof of concept, the game is planned to be on PC only for the time being, but the team could port it to smartphones and tablets in the future when there is sufficient funding and demand. ​BioStories has an episodic format. Each new episode is set in a different region of the world allowing Players to explore many different regions and challenges.

The ActNow.bot is a fully interactive and responsive chat bot, located on the UN’s Facebook page that suggests everyday actions – determined by the user’s interaction with the bot – that can be taken to preserve the environment and logged on the platform to be shared with social media followers to persuade them to take action too.

UNDP is creating a chocolate bar made with Ecuador’s most exclusive cocoa beans and sourced from sustainable farmers in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Thanks to blockchain, European customers will be able to trace every single ingredient. The price of the chocolate bar will reflect its impact on the ecosystem and the real costs of production and export. The profits will be shared fairly, with farmers receiving a significantly greater share than through any other method. UNDP believes that traceability will positively influence European consumers’ purchasing behaviour and hopes to prove that consumers will pay the true price for the chocolate’s socio-economic and environmental impact. If this is true, the model can be replicated in other countries and with other commodities.

Dalili—"my guide" in Arabic—is a smartphone app that helps Syrian and Lebanese families make the most of their money. Without leaving their homes, people receiving WFP assistance can browse hundreds of staple items in local stores and easily find the best prices and deals for the products they want to buy. Customers can also use the app to provide anonymous feedback on their shopping experience to WFP and the retailers. Dalili aims to boost market efficiency, improve competition among shops and ultimately reduce the prices for most popular products.

WFP Storytellers is an innovative communication concept that gives people in need the chance to produce and tell their own stories, using their own words and images, through a series of hands-on digital communications training. This involves courses in areas ranging from visual communication, such as photography or filming on a smartphone, to content optimization for social media and best practices in digital journalism. Through the Storytellers project, talented people among refugees, displaced and vulnerable communities will be able to act as communicators on behalf of WFP and share authentic stories with a large online audience.

Delta 8.7 is a global online knowledge platform exploring effective measures to eradicate forced labor, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labor, as set out in Target 8.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It helps policy actors understand and use data and evidence to adopt policy responses that will contribute to achieving Target 8.7. It brings together the most useful data, evidence and analysis through www.delta87.org, an online platform, and offline events. It is a project of UNU-CPR and a contribution to Alliance 8.7, the international partnership working to achieve this target.

haze Gazer is a real-time visual analytics tool for enhanced disaster management. The forest and peatland fires, which occur on an annual basis in Indonesia, affect the entire Southeast Asian region resulting in extensive environmental destruction and threatening livelihoods. Indonesian disaster management authorities are looking for more timely and effective means of tracking and managing the impact of fire and haze events. Pulse Lab Jakarta, in collaboration with the Government of Indonesia, developed ‘Haze Gazer,’ a crisis analysis tool that provides real-time situational information from various data sources to enhance disaster management efforts. The prototype uses advanced data analysis of sources including: satellite imagery, information on population density and distribution from government databases, citizen-generated data and real-time data from social media. The capability afforded by the tool can enhance disaster risk management efforts to protect vulnerable populations as well as the environment.

OICT provides Blockchain infrastructure (including a sandbox for experimentation) OICT has organized seminars on Blockchain for staff and Diplomats (see https://unite.un.org/techevents) OICT’s Emerging Technologies Team provides advisory services on Blockchain

UN Global Pulse has developed an open software platform that UN Country Teams can use to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their projects. Qatalog is a user-friendly tool that UN personnel can use to Querry, Assign, Tag, and Analyse data from public radio and public Facebook posts.

People who purchase solar cells through the South Africa-based Sun Exchange can lease them out to hospitals, businesses, schools and private residences. The exchange uses SolarCoin, a cryptocurrency introduced by blockchain start-up ElectriCChain. Once all solar cells have been purchased, recipient buildings begin to pay rent for using them, and are charged for every unit of electricity they generate, covering the cost of the equipment, installation and maintenance over a period of up to 20 years. Owners of the solar cells also receive SolarCoins based on the amount of solar energy produced. This alternative finance mechanism will help cities, businesses and potentially private homes to meet their basic needs, knocking off several Global Goals targets at once.

In 2016, UNOPS launched a project to explore how blockchain can be used to increase the efficiency of aid transfers, specifically of 1) entry to the international aid community, 2) intra-agency transfers, and 3) transfer to the end beneficiaries. Especially the second area offers tremendous opportunities for partnerships among UN Agencies. To identify possible technology partners, UNOPS launched an RFI for blockchain-based international assistance, which received over 70 responses that have been made available to all UN Agencies. UNOPS is looking to establish a proof of concept in five priority areas, i.e. payments, identity, data storage, supply chain, funding platform.

As refugees and migrants travel across multiple borders, they encounter increasing protection risks, particularly when routes change, legal practices evolve and borders close. This forced displacement represents a challenge for humanitarian organizations working to provide assistance to people fleeing dangerous situations. This project used data from Twitter to monitor protection issues and the safe access to asylum of migrants and refugees in Europe. In collaboration with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UN Global Pulse created a set of taxonomies that were used to explore interactions among refugees and between them and service providers, as well as xenophobic sentiment of host communities towards the displaced populations. Specifically, the study focused on how refugees and migrants were perceived in reaction to a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Europe in 2016. The results were used to develop a standardized information product to improve UNHCR’s ability to monitor and analyse relevant social media feeds in near real-time.

UNICEF's Laaha platform is a groundbreaking virtual safe space designed specifically to empower women and girls facing humanitarian crises. Launched in response to a commitment made during the Generation Equality Forum in 2021, Laaha represents a collaborative effort between UNICEF, USAID, the Government of Finland, and the Open Society Foundation (OSF). Through Laaha, UNICEF has pioneered strategies to bridge the gender digital divide, ensuring equitable access to vital resources and support for women and girls in crisis situations. Moreover, Laaha has been instrumental in addressing Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) by implementing robust safety measures, fostering digital literacy, and providing a secure platform for communication and support. Laaha's development journey included a co-creation process with affected communities through human-centered design.