EarthAI Hackathon

Just 6% of building materials find their way back into new construction through reuse. The industry largely favors demolition and rebuilding over retrofitting existing structures, perceiving renovation as too costly, time-intensive, and difficult. This preference creates substantial environmental consequences, generating significant emissions and contributing to biodiversity decline. In under 24 hours we prototyped an AI-enabled dashboard tool that enables developers to quickly understand retrofit cost estimates, material flows and policy compliance based on only their address.

On 7th-8th May, 2024, the team of ClimateImpact held their annual summit at the Royal Institution in London. The event connects climate entrepreneurs with investors and legislators in the history-charged halls that have hosted entrepreneurial exchange since the industrial revolution. Part of the summit was the second London instalment of the Earth AI hackathon - a 24-hour multidisciplinary competition with a simple headline: Use the power of AI to achieve good for the planet.

I arrived together with about 80 other developers, designers, project managers and students that morning, thrilled by the venue and ready to commit the next hours to a high pace project. First intros made it clear that I was in great company. From climate founders from most of the world's top universities to long-time climate professionals at the world's biggest firms, the room was bursting with ideas.

After about two hours of networking and idea pitches I found my team set on demystifying retrofit. Driven by years of industry knowledge of Tom Bunn, we soon realised how many publicly available datasets we could leverage to provide users with a cost estimation, policy compliance and material flows for retrofit of most London addresses. We could do this using as little as street name and house number as input. Time was of the essence as we strived to create the best possible demonstration of our app's potential.

Tasked with the UX design and frontend of the app, I was able to quickly sketch out the main screens of the platform in Figma. Then I used Vercel's v0 AI tool to get a headstart on the foundational React components. Our team's mentor was Phillip Mossop, CPO of climate tech innovator Pentatonic, who was generous to commit some of his team's resources to the project: Ben Gordon, in-house UX designer gave some valuable feedback on my early designs. And our own Ethan Edwards gained access to high-performing Nvidia GPUs to trial some of our backend.

Having made mammoth progress we called it a night and returned early the next day to put finishing touches to the presentation. To say we were competing with some incredible ideas would be an understatement – read EarthAI's full summary here. Presentations went great and feedback from the jury was positive. What was left was the announcement of winners in the Royal Institution's great theatre, and we were incredibly thrilled when we won best pitch for our prototype that had evidently convinced the judges. I left the closing networking session more than enriched, having made amazing connections with bright minds from all over tech and sustainability.