An atlas of what's working.

In the boreal forests of northern Sweden, the Vindel River system is being rebuilt one barrier at a time. In 2025, the Rewilding Sweden team and partners oversaw the removal of three dams in the Vindel catchment, restoring 102 kilometres of free-flowing water to a river that flows uninterrupted from the Scandinavian mountains to the Baltic Sea. Two further dams are scheduled for demolition in 2026, with more identified in the years ahead.

The Vindel is one of Sweden's four remaining unregulated main rivers, but its tributaries have spent the last century cluttered with weirs and small dams built for log-driving and small-scale hydropower. Most of these structures no longer serve any economic purpose, yet they continue to block migrating fish and to fragment the freshwater ecosystem that depends on a continuous river network. Removing them is now widely recognised as one of the most cost-effective interventions in European freshwater recovery.

The results downstream of the 2025 removals have been swift. Around 200,000 juvenile brown trout have been released into Nordic Taiga rivers across 2024 and 2025, in partnership with local municipalities and fishing management organisations. Wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout are once again moving through stretches of river that have been inaccessible for decades. The freshwater pearl mussel, a critically endangered species whose larvae cling to the gills of young salmon, also benefits whenever the salmon return.

Europe is in the middle of an unprecedented dam-removal wave. In 2023 alone, 487 barriers were removed across 15 European countries, with Sweden, France and Spain leading the charge. Each removal is small in itself, but the cumulative effect is the gradual restoration of long, continuous river corridors that nature can use again. Rewilding Romania is now applying the same playbook in the Southern Carpathians, with seven weirs on the Ramna River identified for removal that would restore over 22 kilometres of connectivity.

The Vindel project also matters for what it signals about scale. Where governments once treated dam removal as a niche conservation exercise, it is increasingly being recognised as core climate adaptation: free-flowing rivers buffer flood pulses, recharge groundwater and shift sediment that builds resilience along the coast. The river engineers do this work for free, every day, in perpetuity. Northern Sweden is becoming a working demonstration of how powerful that can be.

The RSPB's Species Coastal and Wetlands programme reached its formal conclusion in February 2026, and the headline numbers describe a quiet revolution in British coastal nature. Almost 500 football pitches of wetland grazing marsh have been restored across the project's sites, fifty new nesting islands have been built for ground-nesting birds, and tern rafts have been installed in coastal lagoons across the network. After five years of work, the country's east and south coasts now have more usable habitat than they did when the project began.

The species the project was designed to help are the ones doing the talking. Lapwings, whose breeding populations have collapsed by more than half across the UK since the 1970s, are returning to restored grazing marshes in measurable numbers. Redshank, another wader on the conservation amber list, are following them. Avocets, the iconic emblem of the RSPB itself, are nesting on freshly engineered islands at multiple sites. Common terns are using the floating rafts to raise their young safely above the reach of foxes and rising tides.

The technical approach has been deliberately unglamorous. Drainage ditches have been re-engineered so that water levels can be raised and held in spring, when waders need shallow, soft ground to feed in and incubate eggs. Islands have been built from dredged sediment to give species somewhere safe to nest above the high-tide line. Salt marsh has been re-flooded to bring back the brackish habitat shellfish and shorebirds depend on. Every individual change is small. The cumulative effect is a working coastal mosaic.

What gives the work weight is that it sits alongside an even bigger shift in British conservation strategy. A new three-year wildlife habitat restoration fund, announced earlier in 2026, will invest £10 million annually from 2026 to 2029 to support habitat restoration across National Parks, National Landscapes and the Broads. The RSPB programme has effectively pre-built the playbook for delivery, showing how partnerships between conservation NGOs, water companies and statutory agencies can scale these techniques quickly.

UK coastal birds have been in retreat for half a century, hit by sea-level rise, dredging, drainage and the steady loss of saltmarsh. The Species Coastal and Wetlands programme proves the trend can be reversed. The challenge now is to take what's worked at fifty pilot sites and apply it across the hundreds more where lapwings, redshanks and avocets are still calling for somewhere safe to land.

Roughly 195 kilometres off the north-east coast of England, on the shallow waters of Dogger Bank, the Sofia offshore wind farm is being switched on. The 1.4 gigawatt project, owned and operated by RWE, will become one of the largest single offshore wind installations in the UK once fully commissioned through 2026. When complete, its 100 turbines will deliver enough renewable electricity to power 1.2 million typical UK homes every year, equivalent to the entire residential electricity demand of a city the size of Greater Manchester.

The scale is part of the point. Sofia's turbines stand at over 250 metres tall to tip and use Siemens Gamesa 14 MW direct-drive machines, the largest deployed in UK waters to date. Each rotation of a single blade can power an average home for two days. Beneath the surface, more than 200 kilometres of inter-array cabling connect the turbines to an offshore substation, with power then transmitted onshore via a high-voltage direct current link to Teesside, where it joins the grid.

What makes Sofia notable beyond the engineering is its place in the bigger picture. As of May 2026, the UK has roughly 16 gigawatts of operational offshore wind capacity, with a further 11.4 gigawatts under construction and 4.4 gigawatts in pre-construction. Offshore wind already supplies more than 15% of UK electricity in a typical year, and Sofia alone will lift the country meaningfully closer to the 50 gigawatt by 2030 target the government has set.

The economic side has matured alongside the technology. RWE's investment decision for Sofia in 2021 came at a time when offshore wind costs had collapsed by around 70% in a decade, and the project is being delivered without public subsidy through long-term power purchase agreements with corporate buyers. Construction has supported thousands of UK supply chain jobs, with monopile foundations fabricated on Teesside and crew transfer operations run out of east coast ports.

Sofia is one project in a much larger fleet, but its commissioning is a milestone in a transformation that, ten years ago, was widely seen as too expensive and too uncertain. A million UK homes powered by a wind farm built where there used to be only sea. The grid the UK is building for the 2030s is, slowly but unmistakably, becoming a renewable one.

After a decade of rising deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, the trend has clearly bent the other way. Government data shows annual deforestation fell roughly 50% across the four years to the end of 2025, the steepest reduction since records began. The recovery has been driven by a combination of stronger federal enforcement, renewed satellite monitoring, the recognition of new Indigenous territories, and a wave of private and international finance arriving in 2026 to back forest-positive land use.

At COP30 in Belém in November 2025, the Brazilian government formalised demarcation advances for 27 Indigenous territories, including 10 new declaratory ordinances and four presidential approvals. The country also pledged to secure 59 million additional hectares of Indigenous land over the next five years, on top of the 117.4 million hectares already recognised, an area approaching 14% of Brazil's total landmass. Independent research has repeatedly shown that Indigenous lands deliver the lowest deforestation rates of any land tenure class in the Amazon.

The numbers behind that claim are striking. A 2026 analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund and partners found that without Indigenous lands and existing protected areas, Brazilian Amazon forest loss in recent decades would have been 35% higher and carbon emissions from the region 45% higher. Designating an additional 63 million hectares as Indigenous or protected, the same study estimated, would prevent the loss of 2.5 million hectares of forest by 2030. Tenure is policy, and policy is climate action.

None of this means the work is done. Agribusiness pressure, illegal gold mining, repeated drought years and persistent questions about carbon-credit integrity continue to push against the recovery. Reports in early 2026 show forest-loss spikes still occurring on the agricultural frontier in Pará and Mato Grosso, and a number of Indigenous communities remain in legal limbo while their territories await formal recognition. The trajectory is positive, but fragile.

What has shifted decisively is the global posture. Brazil is now treated as a serious climate counterpart rather than a problem to be solved, and capital, technical support and policy attention are flowing accordingly. For an ecosystem that holds around 10% of the world's terrestrial biodiversity and stores between 150 and 200 billion tonnes of carbon, that change of tone matters as much as any single policy. The Amazon is not safe yet. But for the first time in years, it is being defended.