Millions of little bits

It's Amy again, reporting from New York.

A week has passed since I was at the Clinton Global Initiative, and it feels like I've unpacked the universe these past seven days. It was such a whirlwind and the buzz of possibility was palpable; I hardly ate or drank or slept. I flew on adrenaline. But as the dust has settled, I've found myself wrestling with a complex tapestry of questions about progress, overwhelm, and our relationship with the planet itself. It's been a bumpy landing.

What's clear to me is that these events are great opportunities to find ways to keep moving forward, but they're neither the beginning nor the end of the story. Progress takes time. When we hear about something that reached millions of people, or the launch of a 'new' initiative, it's always the result of years—often decades—of work behind the scenes. And that work continues to be relentless and unpredictable, long after the story has dropped out of the headlines. No one ever said that progress was easy.

Not all of the initiatives that were launched in New York last week will cross the finish line. Some will struggle to secure funding, others will lose their way, and many timelines will be pushed out to accommodate new challenges. Even if you're an activist whose project gets global visibility and you get a chance to rub shoulders with the world's most influential people, there are no guarantees.

Some more thoughts on all of this later, but first, some good news for the planet you might have missed in the last week or two.

Home of the Industrial Revolution closes last coal power plant
A seminal moment in the history of energy. The United Kingdom opened the world’s first coal-fired power station in 1882. On 30th September 2024, 142 years later, its last coal plant shut down. Back in 2014, when they were the first country to announce a coal phaseout, the job seemed impossible—coal still accounted for around a third of the electricity mix. Ten years later, they're done, ahead of schedule. Carbon Brief

California bans all plastic bags at grocery stores
This extends a 2014 ban on thin plastic bags, which still allowed the sale of thicker, 'reusable and recyclable' bags. However, studies found this measure didn’t cut overall plastic use. Climate activists have praised Governor Gavin Newsom for the expanded ban, set to take effect in 2026. The Guardian

Tripling renewable energy worldwide by 2030 is within reach
At last year’s COP28 summit, nearly 200 countries pledged to reach net-zero energy emissions by 2050 and triple renewable capacity by 2030 to stay on track for that target. The IEA just confirmed that this figure is 'within reach' thanks to the blistering pace of renewables build out over the last 12 months.

Indian rhinos thrive and American manatees get a lifeline
India has announced a remarkable comeback for its one-horned Asian rhino population, which has surged from just 600 in the 1960s to over 4,000 today, following 40 years of conservation efforts. On the other side of the planet, the US government has finally put forward a critical-habitat plan to protect manatees in Florida and Puerto Rico.

The OECD’s century-long reliance on coal power is fizzling out
Coal generation fell to 17% of the OECD's total electricity generation in 2023, down from a peak of 36% in 2007. Wind and solar power rose elevenfold during this time. Out of 38 OECD countries, 14 are already coal-free, with a further 13 hoping to reach that goal by 2030. Ember

I love nuclear power, and I wish we had built a whole lot of it. But solar and batteries are even more revolutionary than nuclear could have been.

☝️ Everything we've ever wanted to say about nuclear, by economist, Noah Smith.

More green, less plastic for the United Kingdom
The government introduced a 10-pence plastic bag charge in 2021, up from 5 pence previously. New figures indicate that the total number of single-use plastic bags sold dropped from 1.13 billion in 2018-19 to just 340 million in 2023-24. Meanwhile, more than 1.9 million trees were planted in 2023 in Northern England, with a further 50 million trees to be planted across the region by 2043.

Barcelona’s subways are powering trains, stations, and local EVs
Train-generated energy is converted into electricity, fed through inverters, and distributed across the city's subway system. One-third of that electricity powers the trains, while the rest supports station amenities and EV chargers. Currently, four electrolineras (ultra-fast chargers) are installed, with plans for three more. Grist

• In French Polynesia, researchers are celebrating the birth of Partula snails in the wild, the result of a 40-year effort to save this skittle-sized species from extinction.

How humanity is fighting back against invasive rodents
Island-dwelling species have comprised an estimated 75% of all known recent extinctions of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles; many of these extinctions were caused by the ecological pressures from invasive rats. Global conservationists are now waging a war on them with increasing success. Science

Colombia embraces climate transition with $40 billion investment
The newly-launched investment portfolio will help the country transition away from fossil fuels, conserve and restore ecosystems, and fund ecotourism. Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said that 'Colombia is leading the discussion on how to carry out a truly fair climate and energy transition.' Reuters

Rooftop solar is trending in Australia
A happy accident resulting from a series of uncoordinated climate policies: over 3.7 million households and small businesses now have rooftop solar, surpassing coal-fired power. This means more than one in three homes generates its own power during the day, with the trend set to grow. The Guardian

• In August, Texas built more solar and battery storage than the rest of the United States combined.

US Forest Service wins the arborist lottery 
The Inflation Reduction Act, contains a little known provision of $1.5 billion for the US Forest Service to plant and maintain trees across American cities, principally in underserved areas. This is 40 times bigger than the agency's typical annual urban tree budget. Grist

Time travel in Australia and happy sea turtles in Greece 
In New South Wales, Australia, 20 burrowing bettongs and 20 western quolls have been released into Sturt National Park as part of a ten-year project to reintroduce seven locally-extinct mammals to the desert landscape. Meanwhile, on Zakynthos, Greece, a record-high 1,200 sea turtle nests have been recorded on Sekania Beach: 'The message sea turtles are sending is very clear.'

Progress, problems and possibilities

Environmental and conservation news is my main focus for Fix The News, and one of the best things about last week was that I got a chance to cross paths with some of the people I've written about and to meet others who weren't on my radar. One of those people was Garvita Gulhati, known as 'India's Water Girl'. Her strikingly simple yet effective approach to urban water conservation has saved 20 million litres of water over the past four years.

Garvita's journey started as a teenager, when her environmental education teacher told the class that the unfinished water in glasses at restaurants adds up to 14 million litres every year. In 2015, this led her to start Why Waste?, an organisation dedicated to changing people's mindsets around water. Her #GlassHalfFull campaign has reached over 500,000 restaurants, impacting six million people.

Water is a basic human right and should be available for free to every single individual. It doesn't need complex technologies. It just needs mindfulness and simple solutions.

Improving clean water access is a big topic—the World Resources Institute says that almost half of the world's population faces water scarcity for at least one month a year. Another group trying to solve this is Water.org, which has reached 50 million people with long-term water access and sanitation solutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by creating access to affordable financing, mainly for women in local communities.

As the announcements kept coming, something that became increasingly apparent was how nuanced the reporting of progress has to be. Stories of doom and destruction create cynicism, but equally, if you push too hard in the other direction, there's a danger of tipping over into the climate-change version of toxic positivity—an overzealous insistence on good news that numbs us to the very difficult reality of this current moment.

And that's something I really started to unpack as I moved through the sessions. There were times when it felt like there was just too much to care about. The subtext of reporting on 'what's working' is that when you're listening to how many solutions are in place, you're also finding out about the scale of the problems.

You can't interview someone about an intervention for tuberculosis in India without hearing that every two minutes, someone there dies of tuberculosis. You can't chat with a change maker about cleaning up rivers in Bali without acknowledging that every second, one garbage truck's worth of plastic pollution enters the ocean.

Here, for example, are a few of the 175 commitments made during CGI. Each of them is amazing in its own right—and each is also a reminder of a critical issue facing our world today.

Planting one million mangroves in The Bahamas
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian caused widespread destruction to mangrove ecosystems, and now the Bahamas Mangrove Alliance has committed to planting one million mangroves across 800 hectares on Grand Bahama Island and Abaco by 2026.

Puerto Rico's San Juan Bay Estuary
A new initiative is jumpstarting the reverse channelisation of Juan Mendez Creek. The creek is one of the most polluted waterways in the San Juan Bay Estuary watershed, and the project will impact 51,000 residents and eight animal species facing extinction, including the Antillean manatee.

Restoring shea parklands across Africa
The Global Shea Alliance has committed to restoring four million hectares of shea parklands in 10 countries across Africa. They will grow ten million new shea and native trees and protect the parkland by training ten million women shea collectors and processors.

Equitable access to EV charging in the United States
The Climate Mayors coalition has committed to building 168,000 EV chargers in disadvantaged communities across the US and supporting the electric mobility investment in public transit by connecting local mayors with available funding sources.

Empowering Turkey, Ukraine, and Colombia with solar power
SoLights are designed to provide individualised access to solar-powered light and charging capability for devices like tablets and laptops. Over the past year, 10,000 of these lights have been distributed to communities, impacting 50,000 individuals in Turkey and Ukraine. Meanwhile, another initiative is working to install 38 mini solar farms in isolated areas of Colombia that are affected by poor energy supply.

Investing in a sustainable economy for women
Women-led ventures receive just 3% of climate capital funding. That's why Women In the Sustainable Economy and their partners have committed an additional $392 million to expand women’s access to employment, training, leadership roles, and financial resources in the green and blue sectors.

Protection for journalists reporting on climate change
The Committee to Protect Journalists announced the Climate Crisis Journalist Protection Initiative, which will help protect journalists from threats associated with their work on climate change and the environment.

• A reforestation project in East Africa is aiming to plant 100 million trees and has enrolled over 8,500 farmers in an agroforestry training program. 
• The first large-scale composting effort in the US Virgin Islands. 
• A boost for women-led climate philanthropy in the Caribbean.
• Supporting female-led farming households in Kenya and Ethiopia.
• Increasing the accessibility of climate resources to reach 11 million people.

For me, the most impactful moment of the event wasn't any of the announcements or any of the times global leaders made surprise appearances. It happened in one of the smaller conference rooms during a spotlight session on land management, when Nemonte Nenquimo, the extraordinary Indigenous activist from Ecuador, was asked to share her thoughts:

'I want to say that I've been at many climate conferences, and there's a lot of talking, a lot of commitments, a lot of applause. But we are facing a climate crisis, and we need to change the system from within.' Then she added something that struck me to my core: 'Mother Earth is not asking us to save her. She is demanding that we respect her.'

I consider myself pretty well-informed about what's happening around the world to try to fix things, but that simple statement made me question our entire framework. Are we even coming at these problems from the right angle? What's the difference between wanting to save the Earth and respecting it? And how do we remember how to respect it when we've gone so far down a different road?

In the last month alone, there has been catastrophic flooding in the United States, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, France, Italy, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria. What are we supposed to do with that knowledge? How much worse does it need to get before we collectively decide to change?

So I'm walking away with a mix of emotions. After two days of intoxicating inspiration, I came back to reality with a thump. There's comfort, however, in knowing that the people I met have now returned to their corners of the world, put away their Sunday best, and picked up where they left off. There's genuine warmth in knowing more of their names and stories and about the work they are doing to mend things.

What a gathering like CGI shows us is that international collaboration is possible. That you can fill a room with over 2,000 people deeply committed to making real change. That there are solutions happening right now to problems I didn't even know existed a week ago. And I will champion any event where people who do the invisible work get a chance to be seen.

But it's also overwhelming. The 'world' is a lot to take in, especially when you step into a place like New York during a week when it feels like the centre of global action. For every inspiring initiative, there's the sobering reality of how much is broken. It's like opening a box that can't be shut again—once you know, you can't un-know. And that knowledge comes with a weight, a responsibility that's not easy to reconcile with everyday life.

As I sat in a café yesterday, I found myself wanting to switch off. I silently urged myself to stay open, to allow this experience to change me as I need to change, rather than resisting it. Because that's the real challenge of events like these—not just hearing about global issues and solutions, but allowing that knowledge to transform us and our actions in meaningful ways, after we've left the building.

It's not an easy process. It's uncomfortable and overwhelming, and at times it can make you feel small in the face of such enormous challenges. But it's also inspiring, energising, and ultimately necessary if the story of progress is going to trump the story of collapse.

If you find yourself facing a similar existential crisis, I recommend sitting down with Dr Jane Goodall for a quick chat, which is something I was lucky enough to do just after she appeared on the main stage with José Andrés.

'You can't save the planet,' she told me. 'We have this expression "think globally, act locally", but it's the wrong way around. If you think locally, you see that you can make a difference and you want to do more. And then you realise that around the globe there are other people acting, who are doing their little bit—and millions of little bits add up to big change.'

So that's what I'm taking with me—millions of little bits. That's what counts. And while 175 commitments are a great start, we can't leave it there. We all need to step up and commit to eight billion more.

That's it for this edition—we'll see you next week.

With love,

Amy

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