Global South Innovation Challenge 2026 TECH4Resilience for AI-Powered Humanitarian and Resilience Solutions

Global South Innovation Challenge 2026 TECH4Resilience for AI-Powered Humanitarian and Resilience Solutions is sponsored by Global Resilience Partnership (with Trafigura Foundation, Shockwave Foundation, Munich Re Foundation, ICIMOD, and the SEACAR Alliance). The Global South Innovation Challenge 2026 supports locally led, transformative resilience solutions across the Global South through three thematic tracks: RAIN (sustainable agriculture), RISE (urban informal economies), and TECH4Resilience.

The AI Safety Policy Entrepreneurship Fellowship is FAS's route for turning technical and domain expertise into frontier AI safety policy that actually moves. It is a part-time hybrid programme running 30 September 2026 to 28 February 2027, with applications due 7 September 2026, and it pays a USD 5,000 stipend plus up to USD 1,000 as a merit award. Fellows commit roughly five hours a week to developing a policy memo on a specific AI safety challenge, attend training sessions, join an in-person retreat in California from 4 to 7 November 2026, and present at a capstone event in Washington DC during the week of 22 February 2027. The design target is explicit and unusual: it recruits early- to mid-career professionals who have limited direct public policy experience but deep expertise elsewhere - technical AI research, academia, think tanks, civil society, industry, law, cybersecurity and national security - and teaches them the mechanics of getting an idea adopted. Selection weighs clear understanding of AI governance challenges, concrete implementation-oriented solutions rather than broad principles, awareness of which stakeholders must be moved, and a credible commitment to translating expertise into policy outcomes. Because the stipend is modest and the time commitment part-time, this is designed to sit alongside an existing job rather than replace one.

The VESRI Climate Modeling Challenge is a Schmidt Sciences call, run through the Virtual Earth System Research Institute, that funds research teams to make coupled climate models faster to improve, more reproducible and more accurate. The challenge will fund up to five teams with up to 2 million US dollars each over 24 months to implement and test new methods, explicitly including machine learning, improved representation of physical processes, and advanced calibration workflows. Expressions of intent were invited through 11 September 2026, with a full proposal stage to follow for shortlisted teams. The framing matters: VESRI is targeting the engineering bottleneck in climate modelling rather than climate science questions as such. Coupled model development cycles are slow because calibration is expensive and model updates are hard to reproduce, and the challenge asks teams to demonstrate methods that shorten that loop. Proposals that treat machine learning as an end in itself, rather than as a means to faster and more reproducible model iteration, are mismatched to the brief. VESRI already coordinates hundreds of climate and data scientists across nine projects, 17 countries and 65 research institutions, and Schmidt Sciences has granted 26 million dollars to researchers working on translating climate models into climate action, so this challenge extends an established portfolio. Applicants should expect to compete against teams with existing coupled-model infrastructure, and a proposal without access to a working coupled model to improve is at a structural disadvantage.

The Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program supports projects that address research and deployment challenges in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate science by leveraging AI and machine learning, while also creating publicly available datasets and tools to catalyze further work. The program enables key partnerships that accelerate the research-to-deployment cycle, creating synergies between academic researchers, nonprofits, startups and other companies, and governmental or intergovernmental organizations. Funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Google DeepMind, with Future Earth serving as fiscal sponsor, this is one of the few dedicated grant programs specifically targeting the intersection of AI/ML and climate change. Projects typically involve climate modeling, weather prediction, emissions monitoring, energy optimization, biodiversity monitoring, and other environmental applications of machine learning. The 2026 competition opens with a full proposal deadline of September 15, 2026. The program has grown steadily since its inception, funding 23 projects to date across diverse climate domains and geographies.