2024's positive environmental news to ease your angst

Working in climate communications, it’s all too easy to succumb to doom-mongering. That creeping sense of despair that whatever we do now, it’s too little too late. That the growing chaos wreaked by climate change around the world is playing into the hands of political hard men, wannabe dictators and a cabal of tech gazillionaires who seek to destabilise democracy.

Remaining optimistic is a challenge in these volatile times. But it is essential. So let’s draw comfort from some of the many positive achievements of the year.

Green investment and renewables:

Whatever Donald “Drill, Baby, Drill” Trump does to try to prop up the US oil industry when he gets back in power, he can’t wind back the progress of the Inflationary Reduction Act (IRA) – which has transformed the US renewables sector, adding in this year alone 56GW of solar, wind and storage capacity (with a further 1,100 GW in the pipeline) –  or derail the green transition. That train has already left the station, baby.

Meanwhile, China has been leading the solar power revolution, adding nearly 510 GW enough to power nearly 51 million homes for a year – according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Europe has also seen record growth: Renewable energy is now the leading source of energy in the EU, approaching 50% of total energy supply.

There was good news for ESG investors too: The European Commission reported in August that €3.5 billion of EU money pumped into environmental schemes through the LIFE programme gave a tenfold return on investment. According to the Impact Investing Institute, the positive social/environmental impact investing market in the UK was estimated to be worth £76.8 billion at the end of 2023 – far outpacing the growth of any other asset management sector in the same period by over 10%.

In August, Australia’s largest bank CBA announced it will stop financing fossil fuel companies that don’t comply with the Paris Agreement’s climate goals by the end of 2024 – a huge win for an economy that is so reliant upon oil and gas. While in the UK in September, we saw the closure of our last coal mine in Nottinghamshire.

The UK green transition sector will be greatly boosted by the National Wealth Fund (unveiled in October) and other measures including the removal of the ban on onshore wind farms this year and the Energy Independence Act’s ‘Warm Homes Plan’, which will see the government investing an extra £6.6 billion over the next five years to upgrade five million homes with insulation, solar panels, batteries and low-carbon heating.

Action on Nature:

While Nature COP16 in Cali, Columbia, ultimately fell far short in terms of the huge funding gap that’s needed to restore nature (only $163 million was pledged by 8 nations including the UK for the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund), this year was celebrated as the first “People’s COP” with greatly increased participation from indigenous people, communities and youth.

The EU’s Nature Restoration Law, which finally passed into law in June, will do much to bring back biodiversity to the mainland Europe in the coming decades, with its goal is to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030, and all degraded ecosystems by 2050.

There have been some encouraging big wins in environmental litigation. In July, in a landmark case, the Machángara River in Ecuador won the right not to be polluted. The court found that pollution from the capital city of Quito had violated the rights of the river and all its half-alive occupants – and the government had to do something. This is just one example: The Grantham Institute  recorded 2,666 cases of climate litigation cases filed globally between May 2023-4 and case numbers are growing positively.

Despite ongoing reports of deforestation in the Amazon, in Colombia at least (home to 1/3 of the rainforest) deforestation has been falling by a significant rate year-on-year (36% YoY in 2023), thanks to campaigning by indigenous activist groups. And Brazil this year pledged to restore 30 million acres of degraded land.

Ocean protection is also gathering force: The Australian government pledged to protect 52% of its oceans this year, far more than the global 30% target by 2030 – and as part of that it has expanded the reach of a sub-Antarctic marine nature reserve by 300,000 sq km.

We’ve also seen a number of ‘ancient breeds’ coming back including the reintroduction of a herd of 170 European Bison reintroduced to Romania’s Țarcu mountains that will help to capture and store carbon. The UK are following on their hooves by bringing back the Tauro - a breed of huge wild cattle to the Scottish Highlands by 2026. 

Hopefully, we will see more green shoots for nature in 2025: with Labour’s appointment of a Special Representative for Nature who will be charged with halting environmental collapse and putting nature at the heart of UK domestic and foreign policy. 

Finally, 2024 has seen the world getting to grips with methane. The Global Methane Pledge – signed at COP29 in Baku – unites 159 participating countries in pursuit of a goal to cut methane emissions 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. While the news that the highly potent GHG is accelerating exponentially in the atmosphere is hardly going to fill anyone with Christmas cheer, at least it’s a move in the right direction. So let’s all compost our festive leftovers this year using proper aerobic decomposition! Cheers to that!