Bad news this year has, at times, felt relentless. And towards the end of 2023, we were reminded, by the latest UN climate talks in Dubai, that global efforts to overcome the worst effects of climate change are progressing much slower than the pace of global warming.
But please don’t sigh and lose all hope. There was a genuine breakthrough at that COP28 meeting. For the first time, countries agreed to "transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. Whatever you think of these COP meetings, and they are far from perfect, for once the world came together and said: “We want to move away from fossil fuels.”
However small a victory finally acknowledging the key cause of climate change after almost 30 years is, it's a win nonetheless. And it's just one of several significant leap forwards happening in the world today.
Hidden revolution
You may not have heard of it, but there's a technological transformation taking place in the UK – one that is gradually weaning us off fossil fuels.
For instance, every single month of 2023 saw an estimated 17,000 households add solar panels to their properties – not bad considering solar energy is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, according to the International Energy Agency. And to store all that cheap electricity, battery plants are popping up all over the country at an astonishing rate.
Sure, this change is happening later, and more slowly, than most climate scientists (and many science journalists) would have hoped. But it is happening.
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Breakthroughs worth celebrating
Amid all of today's eco-anxiety, I have found it helpful, even therapeutic, to remind myself that inspiring, world-changing scientific discoveries are continuously being made. While some of them will help us get ourselves out of this human-made mess, some of them are just fascinating.
One example is a particularly clever fuel source created by researchers at Cambridge University. The team has produced ‘floating fuel factories’ that are based on artificial leaves. It is early days for this technology, but the eventual aim is to create carpets of leaves that would use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuel.
Rather than burning fossilised sources of carbon, projects like this would create new fuel that actually uses atmospheric carbon dioxide as an ingredient.
Even artificial intelligence – probably the most maligned, feared and revered tech topic of our times – will play its part. This year, a team of researchers developed an AI that could soon predict the ingredients and properties of 2.2 million materials unknown to science (our current recipe book of matter contains around 20,000 inorganic materials). It's hoped at least some of them could be used to create more efficient and safer batteries.
Biodiversity crisis
But it's not all about humans. In 2024, we must make progress in bettering the world for the other species we share this fragile planet with.
The truth, when it comes to biodiversity, is that we’re not doing well. The natural world is continuing to degrade and decline, with 1 in 6 species here in the UK now under threat. Humanity is still raging a suicidal war on nature, to borrow a term from UN Secretary-General António Guterres
But there have been some inspiring signals in recent months of how dramatically nature can recover if we just give it a chance – and some space.
Consider the blue whales in the Seychelles region of the Indian Ocean. Although it was thought these gigantic mammals (the largest ever to have lived on Earth) were wiped out in the region by Soviet whalers during the 1960s, they have returned. After studying underwater sound recordings, scientists revealed that blue whales were singing their deep, pulsing song in the area for several months of 2023.
Other species that were thought lost forever have made a comeback. These include the blind De Winton's golden mole that ‘swims’ through sand – an animal presumed extinct since the 1930s. The creature was rediscovered by conservationists and geneticists using environmental DNA (basically genetic fingerprints left by the animal in the sand).
This South African mole, is actually the 12th species to be rediscovered by the Search for Lost Species project, which was launched just six years ago. Others include a giant bee, a climbing salamander, and the gloriously named Attenborough's Long-beaked Echidna.
Much closer to home this year, a furry icon of the British countryside was reintroduced to one of the most beautiful places in England. Hundreds of captive-bred water voles were released in a boggy, restored valley habitat in the Lake District.
Certainly, all these breakthroughs and glimpses of success shouldn’t make us complacent. But they should give us hope. And we need that as we take on the challenges of 2024.
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