Climate crisis

The climate crisis demands action — and action is happening. This archive tracks real progress: policy wins, clean-energy milestones, community resilience, and scientific advances that show meaningful change is possible. Stories here come from every corner of the world.

Coral reef with fish, for article on international coral reef initiative, for article on Great Barrier Reef protection

Australia’s environment minister uses their powers to rejects coal mine for the first time in nation’s history

By / / Good News For Humankind

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef just got a powerful new defender: for the first time ever, a federal environment minister has blocked a coal mine using national environmental law. The proposed open-cut mine would have operated for about 20 years just 10 kilometers from the reef, with sediment and runoff likely to harm its already fragile waters. Public response was overwhelming — more than 9,000 submissions poured in during a 10-day comment window, most urging rejection. Minister Tanya Plibersek agreed, calling the environmental risks simply too great. The decision won’t save the reef on its own, but it proves that federal environmental law has real teeth — and that everyday voices, gathered in numbers, can still shift what governments are willing to do.

Aerial view of Shanghai traffic, for article on global EV sales

10% of global car sales were electric in 2022 for first time ever

By / / Good News For Humankind

Electric vehicles crossed a quiet but enormous threshold in 2022, making up one in every ten new cars sold worldwide for the first time. Roughly 7.8 million fully electric vehicles found buyers that year, even as overall car sales slipped. China led the charge, with EVs accounting for nearly a fifth of new cars sold there, while Europe wasn’t far behind at 11%. Behind the numbers is a deeper shift: battery prices have fallen dramatically over the past decade, and major automakers are doubling their EV output even as their broader sales decline. Ten percent is the moment a technology stops being niche and starts reshaping an industry — a hopeful signal for the global push toward cleaner transport.

Aerial view of Tongass National Forest, for article on Tongass National Forest roadless rule

Biden restores protections to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest

By / / Good News For Humankind

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is once again off-limits to logging and new road construction, after the USDA restored protections across the 17-million-acre rainforest — a landscape slightly larger than West Virginia that holds nearly half of all carbon stored in U.S. national forests. Tribal Nations in Southeast Alaska, including the Organized Village of Kake, led the years-long push to bring the safeguards back. For communities who have hunted, fished, and lived among the 800-year-old cedars and wild salmon streams for thousands of years, it’s a hard-won recognition. The victory also points to something bigger: protecting old-growth forests at scale is one of the most affordable, ready-now climate tools we have — no new technology required, just the will to leave ancient places standing.

Wind turbines in a field, for article on clean energy investment

Global investment in clean energy matches that in fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2022

By / / Good News For Humankind

Clean energy investment hit $1.1 trillion globally in 2022, matching every dollar spent on fossil fuels for the first time ever. Electric vehicles led the charge, with spending jumping 54 percent in a single year to $466 billion. Wind, solar, batteries, and heat pumps all set records too — this wasn’t a fluke driven by one hot sector, but money moving across the whole clean economy. China poured in nearly half the total, sparking a kind of race that tends to push costs down for everyone. Parity isn’t the finish line — the world still needs to roughly quadruple this pace to hit net zero by 2050 — but it’s the moment the global energy story quietly flipped.