GOOD NEWS

From Around The World

Stories that celebrate progress for people and the planet that you rarely hear about

The World Bank is launching a project in Vietnam to distribute 300,000 water purifiers to 8,000 schools and institutions across the country. It’s expected to make clean water available to around two million children and to reduce carbon emissions by almost 3 million tons over the next five years (no more burning wood to boil water).

The World Bank

More than $6.2 billion was raised by Turkish citizens for earthquake relief efforts, thanks to a joint broadcast called Türkiye, One Heart that ran on more than 200 TV channels and over 500 radio stations. Support came from people in all walks of life, from the CEOs of huge corporations to children who donated the money in their piggy banks.

Daily Sabah

A former railway line Singapore is being converted into a green corridor spanning 24 kilometres, from the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in the north, to the city’s central business district. The corridor will help preserve mangroves, forests and grassland, provide a safe haven for animals to traverse between green spaces, and will be ten times longer than the High Line in New York.

Bloomberg

In the past six years Ghana has reforested over 628,000 hectares of land, putting the country seven years ahead of its target to restore 2 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. The success is attributed to an agroforestry programme that helps farmers plant trees on their land.

Afrik21

British Columbia is changing its forest management approach to include greater participation of Indigenous communities in land-use decisions and accelerate the protection of old-growth forests. The new measures will herald the end of prioritising timber extraction over biodiversity and carbon storage.

Narwhal

Uganda’s recently released poverty report shows that between 2017 and 2020, at least 1.52 million Ugandans joined the middle class, meaning “they secured better livelihoods compared to the previous period.” The report also shows that poverty is on a long-running decrease, having fallen from 56% in 1993 to 20.3% in 2021.

UNDP

The Djéké triangle in the DRC, home to the critically endangered western lowland gorillas, has become part of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. The protections will secure one of the oldest long-term research sites for the gorillas and the customary rights of 13 local communities to access the resources they depend on.

Afrik21

After 25 years of effort, the Mexican Wolf Recovery Program is gaining momentum with the population doubling from 98 in 2015 to 196 last year. The increase gives wildlife officials hope that they will reach their goal of 320 Mexican wolves sustained for eight years across southern Arizona and New Mexico.

Cronkite News

Chilika Lake, the second biggest lake in India, was declared dead in the 1990s, but two decades of conservation work has resulted in a six-fold increase in seagrass and the return of marine life. The project has also changed the livelihoods of two million people: every rupee the government spent on restoration resulted in at least seven rupees of benefits to fisheries, tourism and carbon capture.

Mongabay