The first edition of the "Team Up for Climate Change Challenge," a student challenge launched by the Egis Foundation, has just announced the four winning projects, and "Impact Seekers," one of the Nova SBE teams who participated were now selected as finalists.

The Egis Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting climate change, has recently just launched the first edition of the "Team Up for Climate Change Challenge," a challenge in which students worldwide are asked to design concrete actions to address the crisis and a Nova SBE team of students was chosen as one of the winning finalists.

Under the scope "adapting and living together in the face of climate risks," 524 participants of over 60 different nationalities applied to this first edition. Sixteen teams were selected to work on their ideas and, with the help of Egis mentors and a specialized incubator, mature them into business value propositions that were then submitted to the challenge's jury.

Four of the 16 teams are composed of Nova SBE students – Impact Seekers, Watershift, Acquamize, and Farmspire. Impact Seekers, a project that analyzed Portugal's current forest wildfire response and its inefficient manual patrolling, designed an integrated system to aid local authorities in handling these extreme conditions. As one of the four finalists, this innovative project will now benefit from additional coaching from the group's experts and continue developing their project, which they will present on November 26 at the Earth University at UNESCO in Paris.

When asked about the importance of this recognition and Professor Anne-Laure Fayard's help, the Impact Seekers stated that "(…) The Design Thinking methodology allowed us to combine our different capabilities in the service of a single purpose, stimulating and expanding our creativity and leading us to the realization of our project. We are extremely excited about the result we have achieved and look forward to presenting it at UNESCO in Paris next November so that we can understand and observe the next steps for its concrete development and practical application to reality. We really believe that with the right support, our idea can help Portugal tackle the emergency of wildfires."

To learn more about this challenge, please visit this page.