Climathon Bonn is just around the corner

The extreme ideas generation event will bring people together in working to solve the city’s climate adaptation issues

The City of Bonn announced it will participate in this year’s Climathon Bonn – an event with various challenges on the topic of climate change. The organiser of the event, the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in Bonn announced that it will be held from 3 to 5 September.

The event is open to everyone, but especially to people interested in the topic of climate change as the participants will have to tackle some of the more pressing issues on the matter. They will be divided into teams, either English-speaking or German-speaking, that will have only 48 hours to develop workable solutions to problems in climate protection and climate adaptation.

The Centre for Social Entrepreneurship Bonn is a joint initiative between the Institute for Education and Social Innovation and the Institute for Philosophical and Aesthetic Education of the Alanus University for Art and Society. Their goal is to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and speed up social and structural changes through a more sustainable approach.

Collective problems require collective solutions

When registering, participants will choose the topics they are most interested to work on and form teams. Then, like with hackathons, the teams will have 48 hours to come up with a solution to the problem.  

Experts working in the local administration submitted several issues to the Climathon that focus on how the city of Bonn can adapt to the growing demands of climate change and carbon neutrality.

The issues call for the development of sustainable solutions for groups that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. These include nursing homes and day-care centres and how they can deal with the increasing exposure to heat in the summer months.

Another very important topic is the need for concepts that can counteract the dismantling of private green spaces.

Other challenges come from regional initiatives like Bolle Bonn or Stadtfruchtchen. Bolle Bonn is a commonly owned free cargo bike service, aiming to offer a more sustainable way of urban low-tonnage freight mobility. Stadtfruchtchen, on the other hand, is an organisation that rented out a piece of land in the middle of the city and started a community garden. It is run by two women and their mission is to promote urban gardening through a network of voluntary participation in the city.

After the 48-hour mark, all teams will present their concepts to a jury of experts, including representatives of the Climate Coordination Unit of Bonn. The jury will evaluate them based on the projects' sustainability, feasibility and originality. The three teams with the most innovative ideas will receive a monetary grant as well as support for the implementation of their projects in Bonn.

Mayor Katja Dörner, the patron of the digital climate event was quoted in a press release, saying: “Climate protection is a collective task that lives from the determination, commitment and new ideas of the many. This is exactly what the Climathon is all about, in which the team develops concepts for specific climate issues”.