Last year Britain used only as much coal as it did in 1600, when Elizabeth I was Queen. UK emissions are now 44% lower than Germany's, which has a similar sized population. The German-owned supermarket Lidl and British-owned Iceland hope to put plug-in solar panels on sale in the UK in 2026.
In Amsterdam's streets and public spaces, adverts for meat products, fossil-fuel vehicles, airlines and low-budget holidays have been stripped from billboards, tram shelters, and metro stations. Edinburgh and Sheffield, Stockholm and Florence are planning to follow suit.
News from the USA demonstrates that restoring and re-wilding rivers systems, and in some cases removing old dams, results in an almost immediate recovery of fish stocks. For example, fish ladders and fish elevators have been built on the Connecticut River in New England to allow fish to resume their natural migration upriver each spring. This was always one of the major routes for migratory Atlantic sturgeons, which can reach up to 200 pounds and live to over 100 years old.
On the Mississippi and Osage Rivers, Lake sturgeons are spawning again in large numbers after conservationists grew fertilised fish eggs in hatcheries for release back into the wild. The California Wildlife Conservation Board has been restoring critical habitat and removing fish passage barriers in the Sacramento Valley - the upper Sacramento River saw a return of over 62,000 adult salmon to natural spawning areas in 2025, compared to just over 4,100 in 2024, a 15-fold increase in a single year. What works is steady, coordinated effort over many years - very different to the shocking state of river management in the UK.
Kate Bailey