Environment
Need some good news about the environment? The Optimist Daily is your go-to herald of positive environmental news, highlighting eco-friendly solutions and scientific progress around climate action, circularity, conservation, and more. Learn about everything eco in our Environment section.
Meet the new climate panel chief, who promises to focus on solutions
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most authoritative gathering of climate scientists, setting the agenda for policy makers. Last week, South Korean economist Hoesung Lee was elected as the new chairman. In an interview with Nature he says: "I would like to be remembered as Read More...
The quest for greener weed
The cash crop is hogging more and more water and energy as U.S. production grows. So some pot industry insiders are taking early steps to make it more sustainable. Growing weed isn't usually very green. In rural California, where marijuana is the top cash crop, it uses massive amounts of water Read More...
An MIT scientist has invented a way to turn pollution into printer ink
Anirudh Sharma doesn't just want to pull harmful carbon from the air. He wants to offer a cheaper alternative to the exorbitant costs of ordinary printer ink. Sharma recently invented "Kaala," a device that can gobble up harmful pollutants and instantly repurpose them, with a little help from Read More...
Drones can speed up reforestation, and plant trees cheaper
Last year’s UN Climate Summit committed to plant some 300 billion trees. However, with our current planting techniques alone we may not be able to get that done in a timely and affordable way. That's where drones come in. At BioCarbon Engineering, an Oxford-based start-up company, engineers Read More...
Britain shows that world can cut carbon emissions and still get richer, says PwC
Britain has led the developed world in combining economic growth with cutting emissions, with the two finally “uncoupling”, according to a major report into the world economy’s reliance on carbon. However, the research warned that the world economy is still reducing emissions at too slow a Read More...
How cities can drive the Sustainable Development Goals
To create a framework for sustainable development beyond 2015, the United Nations recently announced a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals. Broader in scope than a preceding set of Millennium Development Goals, the new goals identify a long list of targets Read More...
Scientists learn to listen when it comes to assessing rainforest health
In the fight to protect the extraordinary biodiversity of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests, some conservationists are collecting a unique set of data: the sounds of the forest. Scientists with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Princeton University are using acoustic sampling recorders in the Read More...
France wants to fight climate change by increasing carbon levels in soil
Scientists are searching high and low for ways to reduce the amount of carbon in the air to halt the onset of climate change. The French believe the answer lies in the soil beneath our feet. The carbon cycle is a fundamental part of life on earth. Soil has the natural ability to store more carbon Read More...
Business on the front lines in the fight against deforestation
Forests are an indispensable piece of the climate puzzle, which is why they’re prominent in the U.N.’s new Sustainable Development Goals, and why they will also loom large at the COP21 Paris climate talks. The land sector — agriculture, forestry and other land use — is the Read More...
The case for optimism about the future of the planet
A sustainable future is not only possible, but will be better to live in. But it's going to require some radical change. It's easy to look at the long list of problems facing the environment—mass extinction, dying oceans, climate change—and wonder whether things might have gone a little Read More...