This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.
Minera Panamá will have to close the Cobre Panamá mine after the country’s highest court unanimously ruled that the terms of its contract were unconstitutional. The decision comes amid nationwide protests that blocked roads and shipping routes as Panamanians fought back against expansion of the mining sector due to its damaging environmental impacts.
Investment in new manufacturing capacity for zero-emissions vehicles, batteries, and critical minerals have jumped more than 250%, climbing from $14 billion in the year before Inflation Reduction Act’s passage to $51 billion in the year since its passage, according to the Clean Investment Monitor.
Sustainable aviation fuel just crossed the Atlantic on its own, with no fossil jet fuel in the tank. A Gulfstream G600 flew from Savannah, Georgia to Farnborough, England in under seven hours, becoming the first aircraft to make the transatlantic journey on 100% SAF. The engines weren’t modified for the trip, hinting that existing planes could one day run on cleaner fuel without expensive retrofits. Gulfstream now plans to share the flight data with U.S. regulators to help certify full SAF use beyond today’s blended limits. For an industry where battery and hydrogen flight remain distant, this single crossing offers something rare: a glimpse of long-haul aviation that could actually clean up before 2050.
Under the state Department of Environmental Protection’s “Advanced Clean Cars II” rule, manufacturers must ensure that 43% of new light-duty vehicles they make in 2027 are electric, with the percentage rising annually to 100% by 2035. Most consumer cars and pickup trucks are considered light-duty.
According to HSI, the African elephant population has declined by 96% over the last century, and poachers in Africa kill as many as 25,000 elephants and 1,300 rhinos every year. Poaching is the most significant threat to these species, experts say.
Prison education just crossed a remarkable threshold: sixteen men at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois became the first incarcerated students in the U.S. to earn bachelor’s degrees from a top-ten ranked university. Northwestern’s program now enrolls around 100 students across two facilities, including a women’s prison, with graduates already planning law school and youth-focused nonprofits. One graduate’s mother, who hadn’t seen her son in nearly two decades, watched him walk across the stage in cap and gown. With Pell Grants finally restored to incarcerated students after a nearly thirty-year ban, this ceremony hints at what’s possible when elite institutions treat people behind bars as full participants in higher learning — a shift that could ripple through prisons and universities alike.
Direct air capture has gone commercial in the United States for the first time, with Heirloom Carbon Technologies opening a plant in Tracy, California that can pull 1,000 metric tons of CO2 straight from the sky each year. The company speeds up a natural process: heating limestone, then letting the mineral soak up atmospheric carbon on open-air trays in days rather than years. The captured CO2 is locked into concrete and stored underground, with companies like Microsoft and Shopify buying removal credits to fund operations. Heirloom went from capturing one kilogram to one million kilograms in just over two years, and hopes to keep copying the design. Tackling legacy emissions, not just new ones, may be essential to stabilizing the climate worldwide.
Whole-eye transplant surgery has been performed successfully for the first time, with a team at NYU Langone Health spending more than 20 hours combining a donor eyeball, a partial face transplant, and a stem cell infusion into the optic nerve. The patient, Aaron James, lost much of his face in a 2021 electrical accident, and surgeons had carefully preserved his optic nerve in anticipation of exactly this kind of operation. Doctors say the transplanted eye is healthy and blood is flowing to the retina, though James has not regained sight. Restoring vision may still be years away, but this opens a real door for people with catastrophic eye injuries — proof that something once considered impossible is now a starting point.
Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic have conducted the first human trials of a new drug, lepodisiran, that has the potential to eliminate a risk factor for cardiovascular disease for which there is currently no treatment.
Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. Ohio became the seventh state where voters decided to protect abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
