The 2026 Global Environment Solutions Challenge (GESC) wrapped up in Shanghai. Xinyu ZOU and Gefan GAO, undergraduate students majoring in Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), won the overall championship.

The event was hosted by Tongji University and organized by the United Nations Environment Programme- Tongji University Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development. It is a core supporting event of the 15^th International Student Conference on Environment and Sustainable Development. With the theme of “Climate Action,” the competition features four major tracks: Climate-Resilient Energy Systems, Climate-Resilient Cities, Climate Change and Biodiversity, and AI & Climate Action. It is a global international event with broad participation and high academic value in the field of environmental innovation for young people. Xinyu ZOU and Gefan GAO stood out from 574 contestants from 58 countries worldwide with their innovative project “FloodSense: an intelligent flood response platform triggered by social media and based on synthetic aperture radar,” winning the overall championship.

The “FloodSense” project, guided by Professor Zhenzhong ZENG and Dr. Xin JIANG, proposes solutions for the timeliness and feasibility of emergency response to flood disasters in the context of climate change, building a flood response platform that integrates public information triggering, SAR remote sensing monitoring, and multi-source spatial intelligent analysis. The project uses rapid public signals such as social media and news reports as entry points for disaster events, combined with Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery, topographic data, historical water body data, land cover, and population exposure as open data, enabling new submerged area identification, flood risk prediction, and WebGIS visual display. This project would transform fragmented disaster signals into actionable climate risk information, providing an innovative path for flood emergency response, urban flood control and mitigation, and climate resilience building. Its outstanding technological integration capabilities and practical application value were highly recognized by the judging panel.