Global Sustainability Challenge 2026
Name of the competition: Global Sustainability Challenge 2026
About the competition: An annual global challenge where students design, implement, and showcase real-world sustainability solutions—supported by a Stanford-led collective of leading educational institutions and experts worldwide.
This is the final round of the international undergraduate and graduate student competition hosted at the Technical University of Munich (TU Munich), following regional finals at IIT Bombay, Stanford, Zhejiang University, and TU Munich. Presented by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the competition brings together teams from around the world to pitch ventures tackling pressing environmental and social challenges aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Date of competition: 29 April 2026
Achievement: Global 3rd Place
Prize: USD2,500 and a place on Stanford EcoGlobal Accelerator Programme
REP Students: Delfina Poernomo and Goh Ruo Si Louise
Product/Proposal: The team designed PeatGuard, a data-driven restoration platform that connects real-time satellite monitoring with communities. It alerts, guides, and rewards villagers to restore degraded peatlands, converting restoration efforts into measurable and tradable carbon credits.
Description: The team built PeatGuard that tackles the degradation of Southeast Asia's tropical peatlands, the world's most carbon-dense ecosystem, by turning restoration into paid, verifiable work for local communities. The platform dispatches restoration tasks (such as canal blocking and rewetting) via a mobile app to trained villagers, verifies outcomes using a satellite-based MRV stack including L-band InSAR developed with NTU EOS-RS, and generates high-integrity Verra-certified carbon credits.
From left to right: Goh Ruo Si Louise and Delfina Poernomo