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Launching today: A 10-part series spotlights real people driving real solutions |
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| | LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION: A cleaner future is ours to build. Around the world, people are showing us how.
Today, we’re launching Fixing the Planet, a new digital series co-produced by BBC and Speed & Scale. The series tells a climate story that rarely gets enough attention: People are driving progress in their communities and workplaces, and there’s enormous potential to do more. Fixing the Planet takes us into homes, factories, and farms to explore how people are cutting emissions and improving their lives.
The opportunities are all around us: Smarter meal planning, crafty cooking, and community composting can help save roughly one billion meals wasted globally every day. By keeping food out of landfills, communities cut methane emissions and households save money. Innovative recycling tchnologies can turn worn-out fabrics into raw materials for new clothes. We have clear capacity to improve on today’s status quo, where less than 1 percent of clothing is recycled into new fibers. Combining solar panels with farming can raise farm income by up to 30 percent. Beyond generating power, solar panels reduce water loss and shade crops to allow them to thrive in hot, dry conditions. Electrifying school buses in the U.S. can mean cleaner rides for 25 million children. Electric school buses cut emissions, save money on fuel and maintenance, and reduce children’s exposure to diesel exhaust.
Fixing the Planet also looks at what’s coming next: technologies to spot wildfires sooner, produce low-carbon cement, and limit warming from aviation. Some of these solutions are ready for wider adoption. Others still need work to bring costs down at scale. Each one offers a window into what it takes to turn a promising idea into meaningful progress.
What’s up first? Launching today, “Five Things” explores everyday strategies that can cut emissions. While not every choice works for every household, learning where our actions have the most impact is a place to start.
On a larger scale, governments must make it easier to build. Companies must invest in cleaner products and processes. Communities must turn ambition into action.
We hope you’ll watch and share these films. The more people who see what’s possible, the more momentum we can build for critical changes ahead. |
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| | | 🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation Hybrid Hype: A record 65.2 percent of the 1.54 million cars sold in mainland China last month were battery-electric or plug-in hybrid, edging past the record set a month earlier. While all vehicle category sales are falling as the Chinese economy slows, the decline is lopsided, with petrol car sales down 40 percent year on year and EV sales down only 10 percent (China Economic Review). Blend Mode: FedEx secured agreements for more than 20 million gallons of pure sustainable aviation fuel through 2027 across five U.S. airports, roughly four times the deals locked in last year. The company said it’s on track to source 30 percent of its jet fuel from alternative sources by 2030, with supply reliability and cost the main constraints on scaling further (ESG Today).
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| | COAL STANDSTILL IN INDIA: Thanks mainly to a surge in solar energy, power-sector emissions in the world’s most populous country–and third-largest emitter–have been flat since the first half of 2024. It’s also India’s first two-year stretch without coal-power growth in more than half a century, even with a 7 percent rise in electricity demand over the same period.
Despite these promising signs, India’s continued progress can’t be taken for granted. In the first half of 2026, economy-wide emissions climbed by 4 percent year on year. The biggest factor was a rise in steel and cement output that pushed industrial emissions up 8 percent. |
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| | 💡 2.0 – Decarbonize the Grid Shared Stack: AI and electrification are converging in their reliance on the same technologies, supply chains, and manufacturing base. According to Ember’s annual futures slide deck, only China is making consistent progress on both fronts, with the U.S. leading on AI but lagging on electrification and Europe the inverse (Ember).
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| 🐄 3.0 – Fix Food Drain and Gain: Google agreed to buy 1 million carbon credits from Mitti Labs by 2030, the largest publicly announced rice-methane deal to date. Covering more than 70,000 smallholder farmers across close to 400 square miles, the deal will fund periodic draining of paddies instead of continuous flooding. This technique cuts paddy methane emissions by half and water use by close to 40 percent without lowering yields (TechCrunch). Bin There, Done That: The biggest obstacle to cutting food waste in New York City is not technology but participation, as most residents still do not separate organic materials. South Korea shows what’s possible: With mandatory separation and radio-frequency smart bins that charge households by weight, food-waste recycling rose from less than 3 percent in 1996 to nearly 97 percent in 2023 (BBC Future).
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| 🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature
Unaccounted For: As rising temperatures push forests, wetlands, lakes, and permafrost to release their own methane and carbon dioxide, global warming could be amplified by up to 30 percent, or by 0.2 to 0.4 degrees Celsius this century. What’s more, these emissions are largely omitted from current climate projections and policy targets (The Guardian). Hundred-Day Fever: From June 2 to September 10, the global ocean outside polar regions set record sea surface temperatures for 100 consecutive days, exceeding every prior reading for that stretch of the calendar since 1982. Scientists attribute the streak to long-term warming and an intensifying El Niño, with temperatures expected to stay elevated as the event strengthens (Mongabay).
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| 🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry Paint It Cool: The cooling of buildings used 10 percent of global electricity in 2025, up from 6 percent in 1990, sharpening the case for coatings that reject sunlight without consuming power. New radiative paints are nearing the cost of premium conventional paint, while ultra-cheap, cement-based versions have cut energy use by up to 40 percent in trials (The Economist). Brick by Brick: Sustainable construction company Holcim will install two firebrick heat batteries from Electrified Thermal Solutions for cement production, marking the technology’s first commercial-scale deployment. While electrifying industrial heat could tackle the fuel-burning portion of cement emissions, it leaves limestone chemistry and its 60 percent of the total untouched (Canary Media).
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| 🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon Store Offshore: Europe has opened its first commercial-scale, offshore carbon dioxide storage site, a way to permanently sequester industrial carbon that’s captured beneath the Danish North Sea. The site is slated to expand to up to 8 million tons of CO2 per year, a significant piece of Europe’s 2030 target to capture 50 million tons annually (Carbon Herald).
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| 🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy Off the Books: The EPA finalized a rule to repeal most Biden-era carbon standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants. The agency also proposed rescinding the remaining greenhouse gas limits on the grounds that they’re not authorized by the Clean Air Act. With power plants accounting for roughly one quarter of U.S. emissions, environmental groups have vowed to challenge both actions in court (The New York Times). Bottleneck Billions: U.S. grid congestion cost $17 billion in 2025, up from $12 billion in 2024, including $3.2 billion for grid operator PJM and $2.5 billion for ERCOT. While the bottlenecks could be eased by new transmission lines, grid-enhancing technologies, and regional planning reforms, meaningful relief will take years to arrive (Latitude Media).
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| 🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action Spilled Sunlight: The fastest available climate gains, argues Bill McKibben, are being wasted rather than missed. He points to an estimated 360 terawatt-hours of wind and solar power that China left unused in the first half of 2026–enough to cover all demand growth and reduce coal generation. McKibben attributes the waste to long-term contracts that reserve demand for coal, and draws a parallel to U.S. subsidies that prop up aging coal plants (The Crucial Years). Offset Offensive: Oracle is seeking two gigawatts of new renewable energy in New Mexico to offset the 2.45 gigawatts of gas-fired fuel cells powering Project Jupiter, its $165 billion data center campus with OpenAI. The move follows local protests over air quality, noise, and water use that an earlier switch from gas turbines to fuel cells failed to quiet (Latitude Media).
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| ⚡ 9.0 – Innovate! Fusion Frenzy: Fusion startups have attracted more than $14 billion in private investment as companies race to prove the technology can move from scientific proof-of-concept to commercial-scale power. The next challenge is to build reactors that can reliably generate affordable, around-the-clock electricity at utility scale (Bloomberg Green). Sea Change: Startup Fluxnium has raised $7 million in seed funding to commercialize a cost-competitive technology to extract uranium from seawater. If successful, the tech moonshot could turn the oceans into a nearly limitless source of fuel just as countries pursue major nuclear buildouts (TechCrunch).
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| 💰 10.0 – Invest! Fifteen to One: Every dollar invested in tackling climate change and air pollution returns about $15 in economic benefits, according to a new assessment by the United Nations and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Factoring 25 measures across six sectors, the report puts the cost of each year of delayed action at more than $1.5 trillion (UNEP). Returns, Not Flows: Sustainable funds returned a median 4.9 percent in the first half of 2026 against 4.0 percent for traditional funds, with assets hitting a record $4.2 trillion. But despite the sustainable funds’ superior performance, they attracted just $38 billion in net inflows, or 0.9 percent of assets, as compared to 2.5 percent for their traditional counterparts (ESG Today).
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