How often have you heard what a terrible year 2016 seems to have been? Too often I suspect. However, buried under all the dross there have been some fabulous good news stories about our beautiful planet that maybe you missed. Angus Hervey, a political economist and science communicator has compiled a list of 99 Reasons Why 2016 Was a Good Year and these are some that caught my eye:
Mongolia is to create one of the largest protected habitats in the world in a bid to protect snow leopards. In the reserve mining, construction, and hunting will be banned.
In October, at the annual CITES conference, 183 countries agreed to the strongest protections ever for endangered animals including parrots, rhinos, porpoises, rays and elephants.
In March, President Obama banned proposed oil drilling along Atlantic coast - let's hope this is not reversed under the next regime.
The scientific journal, Environmental Science and Technology, announced that atmospheric acidity levels are now back to levels seen before the massive increase in industrialisation in the 1930s and which led to the phenomenon of acid rain.
In April, a post from the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that malaria levels, worldwide, were down by 60% since 2000.
Also in April it was announced that 25% of European countries have now stopped using coal-fired power stations. Belgium became the latest country added to a list including Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta and the Baltic countries. Whilst these are generally small countries it proves what can be done.
In 2016 Costa Rica powered its grid entirely from renewable energy for over 100 days and is now aiming for an entire year without using fossil fuels.
On just one day, July 11th 2016, volunteers in India planted a staggering 50 million trees and the country has plans to reforest 12% of its land.
Since the introduction of a 5p levy on plastic bags in the UK in Oct 2015, England alone saw 640 million fewer plastic bags used in the seven major supermarkets.
In October, at the annual CITES conference, 183 countries agreed to the strongest protections ever for endangered animals including parrots, rhinos, porpoises, rays and elephants.
Panda numbers have increased sufficiently for the species to be removed from the list of species classed as endangered.
It seems with efforts from governments and individuals we can see major environmental improvements.
2016 wasn't all bad after all so I wonder what, together, we can achieve in 2017?
2016 wasn't all bad after all so I wonder what, together, we can achieve in 2017?
Happy to see places having bag fees (or banning them all together)!
ReplyDeleteI think it is sometimes hard to find good news environmental stories as everything I seem to read is bad. I'm amazed at the impact of the 5p carrier bag charge. Looking at those figures it's such a shame it wasn't brought in earlier.
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