339. Electric truck. African vaccines. American rivers. White-tailed eagles.
If it can’t happen there it probably can’t happen anywhere.
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This week’s top stories
Energy forecasts from 12 months ago are being shredded by the growth of solar and the Iran war. BloombergNEF says solar is now on track to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2032, several years earlier than it predicted just 12 months ago. These forecasts are always a bit of a thumbsuck — the error is what matters here: once again, solar and batteries are outrunning even the most optimistic assumptions from forecasters. Bloomberg / Renew Economy
Africa moves closer to making its own vaccines. Africa CDC and Aspen Pharma are discussing a long-term supply framework for African-made vaccines, while Gavi is proposing $189M in new incentives to tackle market bottlenecks and buy up to 70 million doses from startup manufacturers on the continent. During COVID-19, Africa produced just 0.1% of global vaccines despite having 20% of the world’s population. Reuters / Gavi
West Africa is turning 15 national grids into a regional power system, making electricity cheaper, cleaner and more reliable across borders. More than 4,000 km of high-voltage lines now connect the West African Power Pool, enabling utilities to trade electricity across borders, while upgrades have brought service to over three million people in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. World Bank
White-tailed eagles are returning to southern England after 240 years. Britain’s largest bird of prey is continuing its comeback in England, with conservationists approved to release up to 20 more white-tailed eagles in Exmoor over the next three years. Since the reintroduction began on the Isle of Wight in 2019, 45 young birds have been released, four breeding pairs have established territories, and six chicks have now been born in the wild for the first time since the 18th century. Forestry England
The Gambia has cut malaria cases by 46% in a single year. Cases fell from 108,090 in 2024 to 58,283 in 2025, thanks to a package of interventions that included the distribution of 1.2 million next-generation insecticide-treated nets and malaria chemoprevention for 127,578 children during the rainy season. Expanded rapid testing, community access to antimalarials and the imminent arrival of vaccines have put a 2030 elimination target into play. The Voice
As China’s car market races away from oil (internal-combustion vehicle sales fell by 37% year-on-year in April 2026), it’s worth noting the country’s electrification push has already made the air much cleaner. A new study in Nature shows the transition has cut PM2.5 concentrations by 23.8% and carbon monoxide by 30.7% across 150 cities, preventing an estimated 262,000 deaths. The air is only going to get cleaner: new energy vehicles now have a 61.4% market share, and nine of the ten top-selling models last month were plug-ins.
Papua New Guinea will protect 200,000 km² of its waters, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. The proposed Western Manus Marine Protected Area will become the largest no-take reserve in this part of the Pacific Ocean, safeguarding coral reefs, grey reef sharks, dolphins and seabirds. National Geographic Society
☝️ The best part of this is that the MPA boundary was drawn by the animals themselves. Scientists tracked grey reef sharks moving between shallow and deep habitats to define where protection was needed most. Conservation shaped by biology, not by bureaucracy.
We’ll share the map as soon as it becomes available. When Gus posted this on Linkedin he got this reply from Dr Frank Giffin from the CTI‑CFF, a six‑country partnership (including Papua New Guinea) focused on marine conservation, sustainable fisheries and food security in the Coral Triangle. They’re the folks responsible for maintaining regional records on MPAs.
Humanity is suffering less from addiction, though you would never know it from the headlines. Most of the stories we hear about drug and alcohol addiction have the same assumption baked in: that it’s getting worse, everywhere, all the time. However, researchers in Shanghai just published an analysis that paints a very different picture.
They tracked substance use disorders (the clinical term for when alcohol or drug use causes serious harm to someone’s health) across 204 countries between 1990 and 2021 and showed that the global age-standardised prevalence has dropped by 16.9% during that period. The average person in the world today is meaningfully less likely to develop an addiction than their parents were.
Most of the improvement came from alcohol, where rates dropped sharply across almost every region. One region though, moved in the opposite direction. North America saw prevalence rise 24% over the same period, driven almost entirely by drug use. That’s the grim arc we’re all familiar with: prescription opioids in the 2000s, then fentanyl in the mid-2010s, culminating in 100,000 deaths in 2021, where this study ends.
Fortunately there is some light. The CDC released new data this month showing that overdose deaths in the United States fell to around 70,000 in 2025, the third consecutive year of decline.
The point isn’t that North America’s crisis was overstated. It wasn’t. The point is that it was treated as a global story when it was actually the exception to one. This is good news: humanity is slowly getting a handle on a problem that’s been around for a very long time. It’s a shame almost nobody knows about it.
Tunisia has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. It becomes the 31st country globally, and the 14th in the Eastern Mediterranean region, to achieve this goal. Trachoma affected at least 50% of Tunisia’s population in the early to mid-20th century, but the government has spent decades prioritising eye-health and implementing the WHO-recommended SAFE strategy. WHO
The United States’ biggest renewable project is already decarbonising the grid. SunZia, the largest renewable energy project ever built in the US, has begun sending wind power from New Mexico to California via an 885 km transmission line. The impact is already visible: in the month after SunZia came online, California wind generation rose 37% and gas generation fell 35%. That is what new transmission is supposed to do: move cheap clean power from where it is abundant to where it can displace fossil fuels.
More of the United States’ rivers were reconnected last year than at any other time in history. Over 100 dams came down across 30 states in 2025, reconnecting nearly 7,900 km of waterways for fish, flood safety and cleaner rivers. NYT
AI mapping tools are transforming rainforest investigations. Environmental journalists are using satellite imagery and machine-learning to expose illegal activities across the Amazon. One investigation mapped 3,718 illegal gold-mining sites in Venezuela, including inside protected Indigenous territories. The technology now allows continent-wide monitoring for the Amazon and Congo basins, allowing reporters to track environmental destruction remotely in regions too dangerous or inaccessible for field reporting. Nieman Lab
27 years after their existence was confirmed, Brazil has begun demarcating land for one of the Amazon’s most vulnerable uncontacted peoples. The Pardo River Kawahiva Indigenous territory covers 4,100 km². This demarcation will give the nomadic hunter-gatherer community better protection against farming expansion, land grabs and illegal logging and mining. Full recognition still requires a presidential signature and stronger enforcement from Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, but encouragingly, the territory has already recorded two years without deforestation. The Guardian
Electric trucking is moving faster than almost anyone realises. Battery-only models now account for roughly 11% of heavy long-distance truck sales and 20% of smaller truck sales in China. The economics are everything here: Bloomberg says electric trucks beat diesel wherever fuel costs more than four times electricity. Since diesel trucks and buses burn about as much fuel as all cars and motorcycles combined, the impact on oil demand is going to start getting really interesting.
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Bonus content:
We’re throwing in a science story from behind the paywall this week.
Can a chopped-down rainforest reassemble itself? Give it 30 or so years and the answer is mostly ‘yes’. The Chocó rainforest in Ecuador gets 15 feet of rain a year and everything there is exactly as wet and alive and absurdly productive as that number implies. So when scientists wanted to know whether a chopped-down rainforest could ever come back to life, they picked a place where the raw machinery of growth is running at full tilt, which is smart, because if it can’t happen there it probably can’t happen anywhere.
They studied 62 plots. Active cattle ranches, active cacao farms, recovering land at every stage from “basically still a field” to “38 years of regrowth,” plus 17 patches of untouched old-growth jungle for comparison. And they didn’t just count the trees (though they did count the trees). They counted everything. Bats. Bees. Moths. Frogs. Ants. Dung beetles. Beetles that eat rotting wood. Birds that eat fruit. Birds that walk on the ground. Tiny arthropods in the leaf litter. Bacteria in the soil at two different depths. Over 10,000 species; a gorgeous study that also served as a tiny inventory of creation.
And the answer was encouraging. Within 30 years, most animals and plants bounced back to over 90% of old-growth numbers and variety. The fastest returnees? Bees, bats, and fruit-eating birds — exactly the creatures the forest needs most, because they pollinate flowers and spread seeds. Trees, being trees, take longer (they’re not exactly known for speed). And the very slowest to recover were soil bacteria and tiny leaf-litter bugs — the stuff living in the dirt, which apparently holds a grudge against being plowed for a very, very long time.
Now here’s the caveat. “90% recovery” in raw numbers and species diversity is not the same thing as having all the right species back. Rare old-growth specialists are the last to return, and some of the soil bacteria communities showed almost no compositional recovery at all. As we continue to learn about soil transplantation, that’s where human help may be of best use. Nature
Also behind the paywall in this edition:
A prevention strategy that cut stroke deaths in one country by 87%.
Ghana may have solved a decades-old agricultural problem.
How scientists found giant squid without ever seeing one.
A cheap scanner built in India could help save unborn babies.
Pakistan tries something extraordinarily ambitious with hepatitis C: elimination.
Conservationists in Florida restore land engineers spent generations destroying.
The fastest-growing energy technology on Earth is no longer solar.
A geothermal company just passed a financial test that could upend clean energy.
The smell of rain turns out to be doing something remarkable for the atmosphere.