Cool City Challenge won the NASA/Sustainable Silicon Valley global competition as “the most outstanding solution in addressing human impact on the planet's sustainability.”

The purpose of the competition was to elicit and provide recognition to potential game changing solutions to climate change and planetary sustainability. This is how out the call for solutions was communicated.

“NASA is expert at systems engineering to achieve impossible feats. Silicon Valley's genius is taking on challenges head-on that others say can't be done. This global competition is a call to the world's leading social entrepreneurs, scientists, and problem-solvers to tackle the worlds' biggest challenges.”

These are the selection criteria by which the Cool City Challenge was evaluated by an expert panel of judges. "The project must be game-changing, implementable and scalable; be bold, visionary and tangible, focusing on a well-defined need of critical importance; be a part of an integrated strategy dealing with key social, economic, environmental, policy and cultural issues; exhibit clarity of solution design; be regionally specific yet globally applicable, and backed up by a solid plan and the capability to move the solution forward."