It’s hard to believe it but we’re now in the year 2025, a quarter of the way through the 21st century! Here’s what to expect in 2025.

Like a lot of people I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened in 2024. Incumbent government after incumbent government was voted out, Donald Trump was re-elected as US President, and key global environmental summits ended in relative failure in Baku, Cali and Busan.

So what lessons can we take from these events? Here’s a theory, for the West at least. Sure saving endangered species and protecting the planet for future generations sounds nice, but if you are struggling to put food on the table for your kids it’s probably not top of mind when you cast your vote.

In many ways, we’ve never had it so good. There is a sense though, that the standard of living we enjoy today is to the detriment of future generations. A boom fuelled by coal, oil and gas has pumped billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, filled our oceans with plastic, decimated our forests, and been a catastrophe for the vast majority of species we share Planet Earth with.

How do we stay positive in the face of such a dire situation? Here are three reasons why I'm optimistic.

Happy New Year! Let’s start the year on a positive note. Yes, 2023 wasn’t a great year for climate action but there are reasons to be hopeful as we head into 2024.

On the last day of 2023 I wanted to look at what the future could look like based on the current projections for temperature rise. A word of warning, this is a rather depressing post but rather than dismissing it as doom and gloom I think it is important to look at where we could be headed in order to understand how to avoid the future described.

The end of the year is almost upon us. It is an opportune time to take stock and assess the progress that has been made in tackling environmental issues in 2023. Unfortunately it makes for sobering reading.

While many of COP 28’s participants were there in good faith trying to negotiate the most ambitious agreement possible, fossil fuel and other major emitters of greenhouse gases were also represented by their lobbyists trying to protect their interests.

The Guardian has an in-depth article recounting how COP 28 President Sultan Al Jaber and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell managed to steer the conference to a final agreement. The full article is well worth a read, but the key point is that they were able to convince Saudi Arabia to relent after 30 years of blocking language signalling a move away from fossil fuels.

COP 28 wrapped up in Dubai today. As late as yesterday there were fears that the conference could end without consensus after the draft text of the final agreement omitted any language about the phasing out of fossil fuels. However after several developed nations hinted they wouldn’t sign such an agreement it appears the negotiating teams from state parties burnt the midnight oil overnight to strengthen the final decision, which now calls on countries to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”.

This might not come as news for those who lived through it, but the northern hemisphere summer has been confirmed as the hottest ever, according to The Guardian. June, July and August had an average global temperature of 16.77 degrees Celsius, 0.29 degrees warmer than the previous record in 2019. Those months were also about 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, which if sustained would mean that the lower limit of the Paris Agreement had already been breached.

I’ve often wondered what it will take for people to sit up and take notice of the climate crisis. It doesn’t seem to be the risk of imperilling their descendants, nor the risk of more extreme weather. So what about the news that thousands of emperor penguin chicks (yes, the same as the one in Happy Feet) died in late 2022 when the sea ice on their colonies broke up before they had developed their waterproof feathers.

Following on from last week’s Montana court decision, there’s another good news story for the climate. The Guardian reports the result of a referendum in Ecuador, where voters have decided to halt the development of all new oil wells in the Yasuní national park in the Amazon.

Over in the UK, the Woodland Trust has announced the shortlist for its annual Tree of the Year competition. There are 13 to choose from and the winner will represent the UK in the European Tree of the Year competition.

The Washington Post reports a story from Helena, Montana where a group of young people sued the state government, alleging it had violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” and won.

Hot on the heels of Plastic Overshoot Day is Earth Overshoot Day, which this year falls today. Earth Overshoot Day is calculated by the Global Footprint Network and “marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.” Basically it means that for the rest of the year we are in ecological deficit, depleting our natural capital and compromising the planet’s future regenerative capacity.

According to Earth Action today is Plastic Overshoot Day - “the date when the amount of plastic waste outweighs the world’s ability to manage it, with environmental pollution occurring as a result.”

KHOU reports a story from Houston, Texas about a 67-year-old man named Victor Ramos, who died on 24 June. His cause of death was hyperthermia - or overheating. According to his sister, Karla, Ramos had been let go from his job in March and couldn’t afford to fix his broken air conditioning unit.

The Washington Post reports that scientists have proposed Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada as the symbolic starting point of the Anthropocene.

Carbon Brief has a story about new videos from NASA that show how CO2 is released into the atmosphere over the course of a year. When you read about CO2 emissions in plain numbers the figures can be hard to grasp, so these videos really bring the changing atmosphere to life.

Sustainability when out and about is probably the single area where consumers are the most well-informed, and the one that governments have taken the most action to regulate. So for now we’ll keep this section fairly brief. The key fact to keep in mind is that most plastic is derived from oil, and fossil fuel companies are betting on plastic to keep their profit margins intact should demand for oil as an energy source ever drop. So every time you say not to something made of plastic, you are sending a message to Big Oil that there products are no longer required.