An atlas of what's working.

The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust has been awarded £21 million from Aviva to deliver one of the largest saltmarsh restoration programmes ever mounted in the UK. The 17-year partnership will restore up to 250 hectares of coastal saltmarsh, generate research on how to measure and maximise the ecosystem benefits, and provide a working blueprint that other landowners and funders can use to invest at scale. Britain has lost roughly 85% of its saltmarsh over the last two centuries, so the timing matters.

The first anchor site is the Awre peninsula in Gloucestershire, where WWT has bought 148 hectares of low-lying land along the tidal Severn estuary. The plan is to breach existing sea defences under a "managed realignment" approach, letting the tide back onto agricultural land that was drained decades ago and letting saltmarsh reform naturally on the resulting mudflats. Once the works are in, saltmarsh grasses colonise remarkably quickly, and the habitat that emerges is one of the most biologically productive on the British coast.

Saltmarshes do a surprising amount of work. Every hectare sequesters roughly two to four tonnes of carbon a year, most of it locked into waterlogged sediments where decomposition is slow. They buffer wave energy during storm surges, reducing flood risk for the towns and infrastructure inland. They filter runoff before it reaches the open sea. And they support key stages in the life-cycle of many commercial fish species, alongside habitat for redshank, avocet, curlew and the little egret.

The Awre restoration is intended as a catalyst. WWT will use the site to develop and publish best-practice guidelines, cost benchmarks and ecological monitoring standards so that other conservation bodies, water companies and landowners can replicate the model without having to reinvent it. The wider WWT-Aviva group aims to unlock more than £1 billion of investment in saltmarsh restoration across the UK over the coming decade, with natural capital markets and corporate biodiversity commitments providing the finance.

The wider policy environment is finally lining up. The £30 million Wildlife-Rich Habitat Fund, the £90 million Species Recovery Programme, extended peatland funding and Landscape Recovery agreements all point in the same direction: measurable, permanent habitat restoration. The Awre peninsula project is a small but symbolic step in a much bigger shift, an English coast that is finally being managed as habitat rather than as line on a Victorian map.

In late January 2026, at the second North Sea Summit, Denmark and Germany signed a landmark bilateral agreement to jointly finance and develop the Bornholm Energy Island. Sited off the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, it will be the world's first cross-border energy island: a purpose-built hub connecting a cluster of offshore wind farms to shore power grids in more than one country. When operational, it is expected to deliver roughly 3 gigawatts of new offshore wind capacity and supply electricity to around 3 million households across Denmark and Germany.

The engineering is bold but the significance is diplomatic. For decades, offshore wind farms have been developed one country at a time, with power flowing back into a single national grid. Bornholm inverts that logic. Wind farms will be built around the island, feed into a shared hub, and export power via HVDC links to Zealand in Denmark and Rügen in Germany. Peaks in one country's demand can be met by wind generated in shared waters, smoothing the variability that has long been used to argue against renewables.

The economics are stronger for both sides. Denmark gets to develop turbine sites its own grid could not otherwise absorb. Germany gets predictable renewable electricity without needing to build a wind farm in a domestic sea it already crowds with shipping and defence uses. Sharing the transmission infrastructure between the two countries lowers per-megawatt cost, and the EU Commission has separately committed more than €645 million to support the project, treating it as an anchor investment in a European offshore energy market rather than a bilateral one.

The North Sea Summit context matters. Nine countries around the North and Baltic Seas have now committed to build 300 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050, an amount that would eclipse the combined power of every UK, French and German coal-fired power station ever built. Bornholm is the first live proof point for how those countries will physically connect their offshore fleets to one another. Similar cross-border hubs are being scoped in the Kattegat, the Irish Sea and the far northern North Sea.

For a European electricity system that has spent the past three years re-thinking energy security in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Bornholm is a marker of a different way to build resilience. Not through domestic gas, and not through nuclear alone, but through shared infrastructure that turns two countries' coastlines into a single generation and transmission network. The first electrons are due to flow around 2030. The politics has moved considerably faster.

Kenya's geothermal fleet is set to cross the 1 gigawatt threshold in 2026, a milestone that puts the country firmly ahead of every other on the African continent and inside a very small global club of one-gigawatt geothermal producers. Two new plants at the Menengai field and an upgrade at Olkaria I are due to come online through the year, adding almost 90 megawatts of new capacity to a fleet that already supplies roughly 47% of Kenya's electricity.

At Menengai, the OrPower 22 plant, a 35 megawatt Ormat facility, is due to start commercial operations by March 2026. A second 35 megawatt unit, built by Globeleq, is in commissioning with a target of mid-2026. Both projects draw steam from the volcanic Menengai caldera, north of Nakuru, where Kenya's Geothermal Development Company has been drilling since 2011. Between them, they will add 70 megawatts of clean, dispatchable electricity to the national grid at a levelised cost broadly comparable with solar.

At Olkaria, KenGen's flagship geothermal complex south of Naivasha, the Olkaria I upgrade is on track to lift capacity from 45 megawatts to 63 megawatts by June 2026. Olkaria has been producing power since 1981 and remains the beating heart of Kenya's geothermal fleet, with Olkaria VI and VII already in advanced pre-construction. Because geothermal is not weather-dependent, each new unit provides baseload power that lets Kenya integrate more variable solar and wind without expensive storage or gas backup.

The strategic implications are considerable. Kenya has effectively decoupled its electricity growth from fossil fuels: roughly 90% of the national grid now comes from geothermal, hydro, wind and solar. That figure is the envy of much larger economies. The country is also positioning itself as the African centre of gravity for geothermal technical expertise, exporting engineers and consultants to Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Djibouti, all of which sit on the same Rift Valley geothermal resource.

For an energy transition that is still expensive and politically fraught in wealthier economies, Kenya's Rift Valley story shows what geographical luck plus policy patience can deliver. The steam has been under those volcanoes for millions of years. What Kenya has done, quietly and over four decades, is build the drills, the pipes, the turbines and the grid that let a country of 55 million people run largely on the heat of the earth. The next milestone, 2 gigawatts, is already in the pipeline.

In April 2026, one of the largest privately funded conservation deals ever completed in South America crossed the finish line. A coalition of Chilean conservation groups, international philanthropies and thousands of individual donors permanently protected 328,351 acres of the Fundo Puchegüín, deep in the Cochamó Valley of Chilean Patagonia. The land is home to old-growth Alerce and Nothofagus forests, granite cliffs, glacier-fed rivers and one of the most intact temperate rainforest ecosystems left on earth.

The purchase locks the property away from mining and industrial forestry and connects it directly to a broader network of more than four million acres of contiguous protected land spanning Chile and Argentina. That corridor is one of the few remaining places on the planet where mountain-to-sea watersheds can function without significant human interruption. Pumas, huemul deer, Andean condors and southern river otter all range through it. The addition of Puchegüín closes a long-standing gap in that connectivity.

The financing model is worth attention. Rather than relying on a single billionaire cheque, the deal was funded through a syndicate: a large lead donation from Wyss Foundation, contributions from Freyja and Kristine Tompkins' conservation network, matching capital from Chilean and international philanthropies, and (unusually) thousands of individual online donors who pledged sums as small as $10. The community-facing model helped build local political support and gave the project unusual legitimacy inside Chile.

Chile has been quietly transforming itself into a global conservation leader over the last decade. Tompkins Conservation's earlier work created the Patagonia National Park and expanded Corcovado, Yendegaia and Pumalin. The government has committed to establishing Cape Froward as a new national park, protecting sub-Antarctic ecosystems at the tip of the continent. Puchegüín adds another block to a spatial strategy that is increasingly compared to the great US national park expansions of the early 20th century.

For a valley that has been under threat from mining concessions and hydro schemes for years, Puchegüín is a genuine reset. The land will now be managed as a protected reserve, with light-touch access for hikers, climbers and researchers who have long championed the place, and with local communities employed as rangers and guides. Trees that were seedlings a thousand years ago will now, with a bit of luck, still be standing a thousand years from now. That is the kind of horizon this century needs more of.