A healthy dose of hope for Earth Day

Monday 22 April is Earth Day, and if you’re reading this, we’re probably on the same page about the urgency of the climate crisis. It can be very easy to feel like your news feed is dominated by a seemingly endless string of news updates about how things are going from bad to worse – we know, it gets us too.

That said, one of the most important things you can do to fight the climate crisis is to talk about it. So, we wanted to share three great good-news points grounded in cold, hard data that you can use to fuel a conversation with anyone you know who needs some help coming over to the green side.

The global-scale positive news below is sourced from Our World In Data – a leading non-profit think tank based out of the University of Oxford, whose mission is to publish the world’s research to make progress against the world’s largest problems.

More people care about climate change than you think

This research by Hannah Ritchie at Our World In Data shows that the majority of people in every country support positive climate action, but this level of support is consistently underestimated by the public.

What does the data say? People across the globe believe that climate change is a serious threat to humanity and that humans are the cause.

In a 2024 paper published in Science Advances, a team of behavioural scientists surveyed 59,000 people across 63 countries. The results found that 86% of people “believed” in climate change – measured as whether action was necessary to avoid a global catastrophe, whether humans were causing climate change, and whether it is a serious threat to humanity. Even in the country with the lowest rates of agreement, 73% still agreed.

In another paper published in Nature Climate Change, researchers found similar levels of popular support for political action across 130,000 individuals surveyed in 125 countries. 89% of people want to see more political action, 86% think “people in their country should try to fight global warming”, and 69% said they would be willing to contribute at least 1% of their income to tackling climate change. Support was strong across the world.

Why does this matter? Governments and policymakers, at least in healthy democracies, will change policy if they have sufficient public support, companies will be swayed by consumer demand, and individuals are more likely to change behaviours if they think others are doing the same. A common argument against climate action at a policy level is that other countries aren’t stepping up to the plate – so understanding global levels of support are essential to kick us all into gear.

Where does this leave us? It means the debate is now squarely about the merits of different solutions, and not whether we should act. That’s great news.
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The cleanest sources of energy are also the safest

Energy is critical to human progress and as the UN rightly says, “energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces today.” But have you thought about how the energy transition intersects with your health?

Millions of people die prematurely every year as a direct result of air pollution. The leading cause is burning fossil fuels and biomass – wood, charcoal and dung. The second is accidents in the mining and extraction of fuels – coal, rare metals, oil, gas and uranium – as well as in infrastructure maintenance and transport. The third is indirect through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with fossil fuels being the primary source of GHGs and the primary driver of climate change.

The good news here? The lowest-carbon energy sources are also the safest for our health. On both the health and climate fronts, rapidly shifting to renewable energy is the best thing we can do.

Tech will fundamentally change the world within our lifetimes

Tech can fundamentally change the world in ways that we can’t even conceive of until they happen, so it’s exceptionally easy to underestimate how much the world can and will change within our lifetimes.

Your great-great ancestor could hardly have imagined having electric lights in their home or flushing toilets, let alone smartphones or WIFI. The exponential rate of technological progress should give us a lot of hope that we will be able to develop the solutions we need to keep tackling the problems we face – so let’s zoom out and put the pace of progress into perspective.

This graphic shows us humanity’s progress from the first use of stone tools 3.4 million years ago. Each dash in the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. Compare this to the fact that we went from the first steam engine around 1800, to the first plane in 1903, and from there to the first multinational space station in 1998. The developments we will see in our lifetime will no doubt be similarly inconceivable from where we stand now. If that’s not fuel for hope, I don’t know what is.

In some more climate and nature news this week…

• 🇦🇺 Albo announces the Future Made In Australia Act, as Australia’s response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced plans to revitalise Australia’s manufacturing industry by producing more things here using clean energy and resources, which will include targeted finance for clean industries. While the details will be announced in the coming weeks, the three key goals are supercharging clean industries, building on existing progress toward renewable energy, and slashing climate pollution.
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• 👩‍⚖️ A historic win for the planet as a group of 2,400 Swiss women in their 70s won the first-ever climate law victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR ruled that Switzerland’s failure to address climate change violated its citizens’ human rights, which paves the way for future plaintiffs to sue their governments for better climate protections – check out the details in this article and this podcast episode.
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• 🌬️ The world’s largest offshore wind project to date has been approved, to deliver up to 5.5 gigawatts of power in the Baltic Sea off the Swedish coast.
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• 🥩 The State of New York is suing the world’s largest meat company for misleading consumers as to its climate commitments. This could be a tipping point for greenwashing and have far reaching implications, in how it may impact how all kinds of big businesses approach their advertising on sustainability. Read more here and here.
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• 🛰️ New tech is mapping environmental crimes in the Amazon Basin. Illegal deforestation, land grabbing and poaching hinder climate action and nature conservation around the world, but are notoriously difficult to track in practice. Governments, private companies and NGOs are now making progress through leveraging geospatial and predictive analytics to predict where certain environmental crimes are most likely to take place. Read about it here.

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This article was republished in Smart Company here.