2024 Urban Future Summit
🏙️ Join us on October 24, 2024 at Dock 72 in New York City!
The Urban Future Lab is pleased to announce, for the eighth consecutive year, the Urban Future Prize Competition, which through the generous support of The New York Community Trust, MUFG Bank, Mitsubishi Corporation (Americas), and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, seeks to find the brightest climatetech startups.
This year, we will award two winners with $50,000 cash prizes through The Future Solutions Prize and the The Future Resilience Prize. These awardees will also receive admission into the ACRE Incubator, New York's longest-running and most successful climatetech program.
New this year, we will be running a prize track explicitly focused on climate adaptation and resilience, the Future Resilience Prize. With this new prize track, we hope to spotlight innovative climate adaptation and resilience solutions, catalyze more private investment into this space, and ensure a positive impact on vulnerable communities most adversely impacted by climate change.
Read the full press release here.
📅 AGENDA
1:30pm - Networking & Bites
1:45pm - Opening Remarks
2pm - Future Resilience Pitches
3pm - Future Solutions Pitches
4pm - Centering Equity in Climate Adaptation Panel
5pm - Winners Announced & Happy Hour
🚀 MEET THE FINALISTS
Future Resilience Prize: Focused on innovative climate adaptation and resilience solutions, the winner of this prize track will be identified based on its impact on vulnerable communities.
Aquaria Technologies builds resilient water infrastructure for cities by harvesting air. Using solar-powered boxes, they produce up to 500,000 gallons of water daily from the sky. Vulnerable communities most at risk from climate change struggle to restore their water supply because of limited capital and geography. Aquaria can provide immediate access to clean water to these communities.
Blip Energy's plug-and-play smart battery gives modern households backup power and lower electric bills. One in seven American households is living in energy poverty, foregoing essential purchases to afford energy bills. Blip is a low cost solution designed to work in any home because they believe everyone deserves affordable, reliable power.
Faura helps assess the risk of properties in natural disaster zones (wildfires, hurricanes, floods, etc) to help insurance policyholders mitigate their risk and better inform underwriters. Faura helps homeowners qualify for better and cheaper insurance by making their properties more climate resilient.
Frontline Gig is an AI-driven talent intelligence platform for blue-collar work in climate. Like the “Uber for green jobs”, Frontline Gig is a workforce development platform specifically for underserved communities who want more flexible apprenticeships in the green economy.
Kind Designs creates 3D-printed living seawalls that protect coastal cities from flooding and rising sea levels. They aim to democratize seawalls, making them affordable to the 507 coastal communities globally that are at risk of needing to migrate inland.
Future Solutions Prize: Acknowledging that the climate issue requires cross disciplinary solutions, another winner will be chosen from our climate sector agnostic track.
DaisyChain Energy is a turn-key solar, electrification and decarbonization solution for multi-unit residential buildings.
Drive Powerline uses GenerativeAI and neural networks to offer an advanced co-pilot for operation of battery portfolios, and an enhanced auto-pilot for end-to-end automatic operation of battery portfolios in power markets.
Adena Power is an energy storage provider using U.S. raw materials and manufacturing to deliver sodium batteries to utilities at grid scale.
Helix Earth Technologies is a NASA-based technology that eliminates >50% of the energy used by commercial air conditioners.
⚡ THE JURY
Nneka Kibuule, Principal, Aligned Climate Capital
Katie MacDonald, Co-founder, Tailwind
Shawn Xu, Partner, Lowercarbon Capital
Anastasia Istratova, Principal Climate Tech, Fifth Wall
🌱 URBAN FUTURE SUMMIT 2024 PANEL: CENTERING EQUITY IN CLIMATE ADAPTATION
As impacts of the climate crisis intensify, so does the urgent need for effective adaptation strategies. How do we ensure that these solutions are equitable, economically inclusive, and grounded in the lived experiences of the communities most affected?
To further support key learnings from the 2024 Urban Future Summit’s new Future Resilience prize track and emphasize the need for centering equity in climatetech innovation, this panel will explore the critical intersection of climate adaptation, social justice, and equity.
Moderator: Lauren Wang, Director of Climate Programs, Trust for Governors Island
Panelists:
Daniel Chu, Senior Energy Planner, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
Erika Jozwiak, Climate Resilience Lead, NYSERDA
Sahara James, Senior Sustainability Consultant, Kinetic Communities Consulting
Tyler Taba, Director of Resilience, The Waterfront Alliance
Look forward to seeing you there! Watch highlights from last year’s event here: https://vimeo.com/892671073
>> Directions to Dock 72: https://www.dock72.com/getting-there/ <<