Sustainable Urban Development
With cities expected to host about 70 percent of the world's population, sustainable urban development is key to making communities worldwide more resilient against the growing threat of climate change. Find out about the latest urban practices from across the world aiming to make our cities more sustainable and inclusive in these good-news stories from The Optimist Daily.
Why we should all trade our fences for this environmentally supportive alternative
To tackle the climate crisis and reduce pollution, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in the UK urges gardeners and homeowners to take down their fences and plant hedges instead. The charity partnered with scientists to explore what types of green infrastructure could be implemented, Read More...
Study finds forests on indigenous lands sequester twice the carbon
We have written at length, in great volume, and with great enthusiasm about the importance of green spaces in cities, carbon sinks, and environmentally helpful trees in general. Forests are absolutely essential to sequestering carbon and our continued adaptation to a changing climate, but some Read More...
This cultural center in Sweden makes a case for wooden skyscrapers
Back in 2019, we introduced you to the world’s tallest wooden building in Finland. Today, we’d like to take you across the border to Skelleftea, in Sweden, where wood is regaining popularity as the go-to material for new buildings. A few months ago, the Swedish town actually became home to the Read More...
Can NFTs help save the Amazon?
Non-Fungible Tokens, commonly known as NFTs, are crypto-acquired assets in the form of digital art. These “one-of-a-kind” digital pieces rose in popularity last year, with plenty of influential personalities and celebrities purchasing them, often at exorbitant prices. Well, whether you’re Read More...
Ultrathin "honeycomb" solar panels achieve record efficiency
One day, cities and hopefully everything else will be powered by renewable resources like wind and solar. To do that, though, we will need to continue to improve on our renewable tech, like creating solar panels that can absorb solar energy in many different levels of sunlight. A new development Read More...
Sponge Cities: the future of flood resilience
The world’s cities and population centers are overwhelmingly located near water. This makes good sense since water is essential for living, and throughout history, people have built their settlements where water is accessible and in abundant supply. However, in recent decades the vital good that Read More...
The climate victory garden movement is springing up all over America
A lot of people picked up vegetable gardening as a pandemic pastime, but what started as a casual time (and tummy) filler has become a mainstay for many Americans. According to Green America, an organization focused on encouraging people to grow their own food to fight climate change, offset Read More...
Buying a used EV? Not a bad idea
Recently, The Optimist Daily published a story about a few things to keep in mind when buying an electric vehicle. Along with gas prices, the popularity of electric cars is rising, but EVs have been on the rise since before the crisis. Now, thanks to that demand, if you’re in the market for a new Read More...
Marvel superhero tackles climate change and social injustice
There’s a new Marvel superhero in town, and she’s a Puerto Rican heroine pumped to tackle climate change, political corruption, and all the intertwined social injustices. In an upcoming installment of the graphic novel series La Boriqueña, the Nuyorican (a portmanteau that refers to Read More...
As Iceland’s whaling industry decreases, its whale-watching increases
It’s nice when the economically responsible thing to do is also the right thing to do. Iceland announced in February its intentions to end whaling by 2024 because demand for whale meat has decreased significantly. “There is little proof that there is any economic advantage to this Read More...