Formerly known as Dr Doom for her pessimistic view on the state of the planet, a leading biologist has outlined ten reasons to be hopeful, celebrating “real progress” in humanity’s efforts to repair damage to the natural world. .
People should “focus on the bright spots”, according to Nancy Knowlton, former head of marine science at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington.
“I want to shine a spotlight on what’s working, why it’s working and how to make more of it,” she said, speaking on the Canary island of La Palma at the Starmus science and music festival co-founded by Sir Brian May, Queen guitarist turned astrophysicist.
Knowlton, who is American, did have one negative note to sound. Aiming at President Trump, she said: “What the United States is doing right now is horrific and it will set the world back and I have nothing to say other than that I am deeply sorry for the role that the United States is playing in the world right now.”
Touching on environmental news, she asked: “How many of you, when you see a story about the environment, decide you don’t want to read it because it is so depressing or everyone seems so angry?
“I spent years talking about all the horrible things happening to the coral reefs I studied and the planet in general. With my husband [Jeremy Jackson], who’s in a similar field, we were called Drs Doom and Gloom on the lecture circuit.”
Knowlton said that if you “just talk about the problems and not the solutions, that leads to apathy rather than action”.
“There has been some progress. Although it’s bad now, it was worse before and there are bright spots that are better than the global average and they are the inspiration for where we need to be heading.”
Solar energy
“Experts have consistently underestimated the amount of solar energy that we [would use] in the future by a factor of three,” Knowlton said.
Power generation from solar cells increased by 25 per cent from 2022 to 2023. It now accounts for 5.4 per cent of global energy generation. She said: “There are a number of countries now that use no or very little fossil fuels to generate electricity.”
Electric vehicles
“Only 18 per cent of cars on the road are electric vehicles, [but] in 2010 there were none,” she said. “And there are bright spots in places like Norway, where 93 per cent of new cars are now either electric or a plug-in hybrid.” Electric car sales in 2023 were six times higher than in 2018.
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Air pollution
“We have made some real progress [here],” Knowlton said. “We have passed peak production of most of the major atmospheric pollutants. Some of the changes in Europe have been really striking.”
The Times’s Clean Air For All campaign fought for the legal right to unpolluted air for everyone in the UK. “Delhi has a way to go, but London has made progress [and air pollution] has basically crashed to almost nothing … and Paris has improved dramatically over the last decade.”
Biodiversity and rewilding
Take away humans and the animals we rear for food, and only 4 per cent of mammals on Earth are wild. The figures for birds are similar.
“But we have slowed and reversed declines,” Knowlton said. “In the US, bald eagles, turkeys, bison are all in much better condition than a century ago. The real bright spot is in Europe. Top of the chart are beavers which have gone from 1,200 to 1.2 million.”
Beavers have been reintroduced across the UK, including in urban west London, where they are now breeding. “We’ve done a really good job at rebuilding wildlife in many places in Africa” shesaid, “with a 95 per cent recovery of large herbivores, a rebound in lion numbers and they have even been able to reintroduce wild dogs.”
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The ozone layer
The drive to ban CFC gases from the late 1980s is “perhaps the best example we have of a global agreement that has made a huge difference”, Knowlton said. “It’s now estimated that [by] 2030, two million cases of skin cancer can be avoided. It takes longer for the ozone hole to heal, but it is starting to.”
Reviving rivers
“There has been a big reduction in pollution in a lot of rivers,” Knowlton said. The Times’s Clean It Up campaign has been calling for urgent action to prevent the discharge of sewage and pollutants into UK rivers. “There has also been the taking down of dams, both big and little. The result has been a dramatic increase in the fish that need to move between the ocean and freshwater to reproduce.”
Removing invasive species
Having wreaked havoc by introducing non-native animals to remote locations, we are now reversing the damage. “We completely eliminated rats from South Georgia island and Palmyra atoll and a number of other islands,” Knowlton said. “This has meant seabirds are booming, and in the case of coral reef islands, the reef itself benefits from rat removal.”
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Reducing waste
“We’re actually not as far along here, but we are making progress here as well,” she said. “South Korea is recycling 98 per cent of its food waste and having enormous success. Plastics are even further behind, but there are places which really have taken bold steps … including Kenya, [which has] banned the importation and use of all plastic bags.”
Protected spaces
A record area of the Earth’s surface now forms part of legally protected zones. “This is an amazing success story,” Knowlton said, noting that a third of all the land on La Palma is protected to preserve nature and its famously dark skies for astronomy.
Putting locals in charge
“I’ve been talking mostly about how nature is benefiting, but people need to benefit too [or] the reality is that conservation really never takes root,” she said.
One programme in Indonesia wanted to stop villagers from felling trees. “Instead of putting up fences, they learned they were cutting down trees because they needed cash to take their kids to the doctor. So they brought doctors into these villages and helped [them to develop] organic farming … and the result has been a 70 per cent decline in deforestation, 90 per cent decline in the number of families who depend on logging for income and 67 per cent decline in infant mortality.”
