Hope for global conservation is what we wish to evoke in our readers with some of the more upbeat environmental stories from the past year that we have pieced together from around the world in this list. These include some of your favorite happy stories, from the expansion of protected areas for wildlife, cancelled reclamation projects that posed coastal ecosystem threats, to the impactful role of indigenous communities in conservation.

2020 is a year that many people would like to forget. Here’s a look at 10 of the biggest environmental storylines to remember.

Tempting as it may be to call 2020 a dumpster fire (and many, many have), there’s really no need to resort to cliche in a year when the world literally burned.

All told, this was a pretty bleak year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought tragedy and confusion; fires razed parts of Australia, the Amazon, and the Western U.S.; and the world is still barreling headlong into the sixth mass extinction of species.

It’s 2021 and we are facing a problem that threatens the very foundations of our planet. The funny thing is, you probably haven’t heard about it.

In many ways, 2021 proved just as difficult a year as the previous one: a world still grappling with a pandemic claiming countless lives and upending the economies and livelihoods of nations across the globe.

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When Professor Rajen Naidoo did a Google search for recent environmental disasters in South Africa, the single incident he found was the 1994 Merriespruit mining disaster in the Free State. A tailings dam collapsed, gushing 600 000 cubic metres of toxic fluid into the town, killing 17 people and destroying 80 houses.

The right to life is enshrined in our Constitution. Yet this right is precarious – every living moment is completely dependent on our environment. The truth is that we cannot exist independently of nature. 

A decade ago, our solutions to climate change were weak and unfeasible. 

Modern food packaging provides a way to make food safe, reliable, shelf-stable and clean, however, some food packaging is designed to be single-use and is not recycled.