February 5, 2021
Denver's unarmed 911 response team is six months in with over 700 incidents and no arrests. That and how France is cutting down on e-waste today on the Update. Listen to The Optimist Daily Update with Summers & Kristy - Making Solutions the Read More...
The Ideal City is an urban ‘cookbook’ for planners to design better cities
By 2050, more than 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. This means that we’ll need to significantly expand our urban landscapes to accommodate for the incoming wave of urban dwellers. In an effort to inspire urban planners to design tomorrow’s cities in a Read More...
Study: Plant-based diets are critical for protecting biodiversity
What is our most powerful tool for protecting biodiversity? A new report by the Chatham House, backed by the UN, indicates that widespread adoption of plant-based diets is one of the most crucial ways to protect endangered species. Plant-based diets are environmentally beneficial because they Read More...
These trainers are made from mycelium and dog hair
In recent years, we’ve seen an increasing number of big brands in the footwear industry make attempts at mitigating the environmental impact of their trainers. This comes as no surprise. Footwear has one of the heaviest carbon footprints of anything we wear, and most of the materials they use can Read More...
Meet the woman who created a safe haven for Black and Trans women in NYC
Ceyenne Doroshow knows first-hand the struggle of being a trans woman of color living on the streets. Feeling unable to express her true self in her home neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, she set out on her own as soon as she reached adulthood. Unfortunately, with no shelter Read More...
France introduces “repairability index” to bring circularity to electronics
These days it’s all too common to have a drawer of discarded cell phones and other broken electronics in our homes, but if we want our economy to become truly circular, we will have to come up with innovative ways for these electronics to be repaired and reused when they get damaged. To achieve Read More...
Denver’s unarmed 911 response team arrested no one in its first 6 months
The waves of protests in 2020 against systematic racism and police brutality led to calls for cities to change their policing systems. Beyond just discriminatory policing, a big part of the problem was that police officers were being called on to respond to non-criminal 911 calls, something they Read More...
Thought Leader Series: Agnes Kalibata on science and the future of farming
Agnes Kalibata is a Rwandan-born agricultural scientist and policymaker. She was recently appointed as UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ special envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit, which calls for tangible action on how we produce food to address the limitations of our food system in Read More...
Why it’s even more essential to stay hydrated during the winter
You won’t go a day in the hot summertime without someone reminding you to stay hydrated, but where’s that same caution in the wintertime? After all, the combination of colder weather, more dry air, and indoor heat actually create a condition in which people are chronically dehydrated. In Read More...
This ecologist spent 2 years studying a single hedge—it’s wild
10 years ago, UK ecologist Rob Walton decided to take on a rather strange challenge: make a list of every plant, animal, and fungus inside a hedge 40 meters from his house over the course of 12 months. Little did he know that his challenge would help influence fundamental policy to help the UK Read More...