The 5 team love having our minds blown by new discoveries and crazy ideas. All year round, we scour the world for the smartest sustainable solutions, the most passionate people and the most inspiring ideas. Here’s what we came across in the last twelve months.
Art in a creative approach to marine conservation. Photo: Gianni Cipriano
1.
Giant stone sculptures are protecting the sea floor ecosystem from trawlers off the coast of Tuscany.
2.
One environmental scientist has turned to standup comedy to get his message on the climate crisis across.
Growing veg in the most unlikely of settings. Photo: Klaus Thymann
3.
In the Jordanian desert, farmers are growing cucumbers, peppers and passion fruit, by using solar power to evaporate seawater.
4.
In Copenhagen, you can borrow reusable coffee cups for free, then return them to any of more than 100 cafes.
5.
You can choose to be buried in a biodegradable coffin made from fungus, which turns your body into compost.
6.
Refugees in the Sahara desert are recycling their own plastic and turning it into products they can sell.
7.
Educating women and girls is a more effective way to hold back climate change than renewable energy.
Another step in the solar energy revolution. Photo: Steve Proehl via Getty Images
8.
France is requiring all parking lots to be covered with solar panels.
9.
When it comes to what you can do to help the environment, recycling is not as important as you think.
Environmental activist Leah Thomas. Photo: Ye Rin Mok
10.
“Environmentalism flows through everything,” activist Leah Thomas explains. That means “making sure we are protecting all endangered species, including endangered humans.”
11.
An English folk musician duets with nightingales.
12.
Trees are people too. Or at least, forests in some countries now have constitutional rights.
You don’t have to dig deep to become a co-owner of this Danish farm. Photo: Kasper Kristoffersen
13.
You can own a farm for €20 a month. In Denmark, thousands of people are signing up to become joint owners of regenerative farms.
14.
Up close, jellyfish look a bit like galaxies.
15.
Coldplay are using kinetic dancefloors to generate electricity from the movement of fans jumping up and down at its concerts.
16.
A single picture really can speak volumes – in this case visualising 302,500 tonnes of copper extracted from the Earth.
17.
You can make chairs from mushrooms.
Soldier flies are looking promising as a free-breeding, planet-friendly source of protein. Photo: David Vintiner
18.
Beneath a railway arch in London, a farm is growing insects.
19.
We would need 1.74 Earths to sustain the way we eat today.
20.
Trash can be beautiful.
Could the future of flying be electric? Photo courtesy of Eviation
21.
A new plane wants to become the world’s first electric passenger aircraft – but so far its maximum flight time is only 8 minutes.
22.
If the whole world cycled as much as the Dutch, it would be like taking one in five cars off the road.
