Wildlife returning, wild places recovering, and people protecting what they love, from all over the world.
Rewilding
More than 25,000 people in over 50 countries gave to bring a heart shaped Northumberland estate into the care of two wildlife charities. Curlews, red squirrels and merlins already live there, and it sits at the heart of a planned 40 mile corridor for nature.
Between Brazil and Ghana, right on the Equator, a valley close to a thousand kilometres long had never been seen by human eyes. In September a Brazilian led team sailed out to lower a robot into it, and found gardens.
Niue's ocean is about twelve hundred times the size of the island itself. Its people found a way for anyone in the world to look after one square kilometre of it for twenty years, and the reef has answered.
On 30 October the Philippine Eagle Foundation gathered its partners at its centre outside Davao City to celebrate sixteen Indigenous communities who protect the forests where the country's national bird raises its young.
When the work began, only three adult pearl mussels could be found in Cumbria's River Kent. By this summer nearly two thousand young ones, raised in a mussel ark, were back on the riverbed.
Four hundred stone steps below the Garut road, a Sundanese village of exactly one hundred and three thatched houses has turned down electricity, turned down an escalator, and this year closed its gate to visitors for three months so the land and the customs could breathe.
Three hours by boat from Puno, at almost four thousand metres, about two thousand two hundred people share one island, six fields that take turns, a three line code they live by, and a knitting tradition that UNESCO has listed and every boy learns.
Nearly every fridge on Earth works by squeezing a gas. A startup in Darmstadt has built one that works by sliding a metal in and out of a magnet, with nothing but water in the pipes, and it is already cooling drinks in German supermarkets.
A month before the world's climate talks open in Türkiye, leaders stood on Tuvalu, signed a declaration named for the Tuvaluan word for strength in unity, and asked that the ocean be written into whatever Antalya decides. Türkiye has said yes to trying.
On 27 April a three day old dolphin was seen swimming with six adults at Kampi pool on the Mekong. It was the sixth calf of the year, and with no dolphin lost in sixteen months, Cambodia's river dolphins now number one hundred and eighteen.
Palau's lagoons run hot enough to bleach the Great Barrier Reef, and the corals there are fine. In August the people who look after Australia's reef flew to Koror to see how, and came home with a model worth copying.
Sunflower sea stars once ate the urchins that now strip California's kelp, until a disease took more than 90 per cent of them. This year, for the first time since 2018, young stars raised in a lab went back to the seafloor off Monterey. Most thrived, and the urchins ran.
