An atlas of what's working.

In Boden, a small town in northern Sweden, the world's first large-scale green steel plant has begun commercial production. Stegra, formerly known as H2 Green Steel, is now turning out steel made from iron ore reduced not with coking coal but with green hydrogen, the by-product of which is water vapour rather than carbon dioxide. The plant is designed to deliver 2.5 million tonnes of steel a year at full capacity, with first commercial shipments to customers locked in for 2026.

The chemistry is well understood but the engineering has taken decades to commercialise. Conventional steelmaking accounts for roughly 7% of global CO2 emissions, mostly because the blast furnace process needs carbon to strip oxygen from iron ore. Stegra replaces that carbon with green hydrogen, produced on site using 700 megawatts of electrolyser capacity powered by Sweden's hydro and wind-rich grid. The hydrogen reduces the iron ore in a direct reduction reactor, and the resulting sponge iron is melted in an electric arc furnace to make steel.

The economics work because Stegra has lined up long-term offtake contracts with European industrial buyers ahead of production. Customers include Volvo, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Scania and Electrolux, all of whom have committed to taking volumes of green steel in part because the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which entered its definitive phase in January 2026, will increasingly penalise high-carbon imports. Green steel is moving from a moral premium to a competitive advantage.

Stegra secured an additional 1.4 billion euros in financing in early 2026, led by Sweden's Wallenberg family, on top of the 6.5 billion euros already raised, taking total committed capital towards 9 billion euros. The location was chosen for cheap, abundant clean electricity, proximity to high-quality Swedish iron ore, and good rail and port access. A second phase, including expanded hydrogen production and capacity additions, is already on the drawing board.

For an industry that has produced steel essentially the same way since the 19th century, this is the first credible exit ramp from coal. Stegra will not solve global steel emissions on its own, but it sets the technical and commercial template that other producers in Europe, Canada and the Gulf are now trying to copy. The race to the top for green steel has begun, and Boden is where it started.

On 25 May 2026, Nature Minister Mary Creagh announced a new £30 million Wildlife-Rich Habitat Fund, ring-fenced over three years to restore and create thousands of hectares of habitat across England's most protected landscapes. Funding will flow at £10 million a year from 2026 to 2029, with 36 of England's 44 Protected Landscapes participating in the first year. The list spans the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Dartmoor, the Cotswolds, the South Downs and the Broads.

The fund is the next piece in a broader recalibration of how England manages its protected landscapes. National Parks and National Landscapes (formerly Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) cover roughly a quarter of England, but a long-standing critique has been that their statutory duty to "conserve natural beauty" did not translate into measurable nature recovery on the ground. Recent legislative changes have strengthened that duty, and the new fund is the first significant pot of money explicitly tied to delivering biodiversity outcomes rather than landscape aesthetics.

The Wildlife Trusts welcomed the announcement, with Joan Edwards, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, calling it "much needed to help wildlife recover in protected landscapes." Each of the 36 participating areas will produce site-specific delivery plans, with techniques expected to include peatland rewetting, woodland regeneration, scrub creation, river restoration and the establishment of species-rich grassland on land that has been agriculturally improved or commercially overgrazed.

The numbers should be read alongside other recent commitments. A separate £10 million wildlife habitat restoration fund, designed to bring water companies and conservation NGOs together, was confirmed earlier in 2026. The Nature for Climate Peatland Grant was extended to 2027. Landscape Recovery agreements continue to bring large estates and farms into long-term restoration. Individually, each fund is modest. Cumulatively, they describe a UK conservation budget that is steadily moving away from one-off projects and towards permanent landscape management.

The challenge now is delivery. £30 million stretches further when partnerships are good, contractor capacity is available, and landowners are engaged early. The fund will be measured not by the amount disbursed but by hectares of habitat in a measurably better ecological state by 2029. For a country that ranks among the most nature-depleted on earth, that is the metric that finally counts.

Britain has lost an estimated 97% of its species-rich wildflower meadows since the 1930s, a quiet catastrophe for pollinators, wildflowers and the people who depend on both. Plantlife's Meadow Makers programme, now well into its second phase, is part of a slow but measurable reversal. The partnership has restored more than 400 hectares of species-rich grassland across England and engaged over 12,000 people in meadow-making, and a recent £8 million commitment from National Highways will fund the restoration of a further 100 hectares across seven sites by 2030.

The technical method is deceptively simple but takes years to deliver. Long-improved grassland (typically dominated by a handful of vigorous grass species and almost no flowers) is gradually stripped of its accumulated soil fertility, often by removing repeated cuts of grass before flowers seed. Native wildflower seed is introduced, sometimes through "green hay" cut from a nearby healthy meadow, sometimes through plug planting. Yellow rattle, a hemiparasitic plant that suppresses grass growth, is often the keystone species, opening up space for orchids, oxeye daisies, knapweed and yellow rattle's many companions.

The biodiversity gains come back quickly. Species-rich grasslands support roughly 800 species of wildflower in the UK, alongside the bumblebees, hoverflies, solitary bees, butterflies and moths that depend on diverse, late-flowering pollen and nectar resources. Birds follow: skylarks, meadow pipits, yellowhammers and barn owls all benefit from the insect abundance and structural complexity these habitats provide. Healthy meadows also store significant amounts of soil carbon and reduce nutrient runoff into rivers.

Meadow Makers is part of Plantlife's broader ambition to restore 10,000 hectares of species-rich grassland across the UK by 2030. The pace is increasing as new partnerships come online. Cumbria Wildlife Trust is leading the restoration of 50 hectares of upland hay meadows. The Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust is restoring 60 hectares across the Dales. Warwickshire Wildlife Trust is creating seven hectares across five farms. The model is fundamentally collaborative, and that is part of why it scales.

There is a long way to go before England's wildflower meadows look anything like their pre-war abundance, but the trajectory has changed. After almost a century of monoculture, drainage and intensification, the meadows are coming back, field by field, and the bumblebees, butterflies and orchids that depend on them are following. It is one of the quietest conservation success stories in the country, and one of the most important.

On Kenya's northern coast, the Lamu County mangrove restoration programme has become one of the most carefully measured examples of community-led blue carbon work in East Africa. Coordinated by Eden Reforestation Projects and Kenya's Forest Service, with local communities doing the planting, monitoring and patrolling, the programme has restored more than 1,120 hectares of degraded mangrove to date and planted 16.5 million trees. The work has generated more than 50,000 paid working days for residents of communities that have historically had few alternative livelihoods.

The wider mangrove footprint that the project helps to protect is larger again. Wetlands International estimates that over 38,000 hectares of standing mangrove forest in Lamu and the Tana Delta have been brought under active conservation management through participatory planning, patrolling, training and awareness work. Mangroves in this region support fisheries, stabilise coasts against storm surges, and store carbon at rates per hectare that exceed almost any terrestrial forest type.

Mangroves earn their place in any climate conversation through sheer carbon density. A hectare of healthy mangrove forest can store between three and five times as much carbon per hectare as an equivalent tropical rainforest, most of it in waterlogged sediments where decomposition is naturally slow. The Lamu programme is now beginning to generate verified carbon credits to flow long-term revenue back to community planting cooperatives, anchoring the project's economics in the long term.

The technical methodology emphasises ecological restoration rather than monoculture replanting. Sites are first assessed for hydrology and salinity, since mangroves are notoriously fussy about where they will grow, and replanting often involves species mixes that match local conditions rather than convenience. Survival rates in the better-managed sites now sit close to 90%, far above the regional average for mangrove plantings, and consistent with the standards being demanded by carbon market buyers.

What makes Lamu credible is the balance. The project pays people, protects coasts, draws carbon down and rebuilds an ecosystem that supports the small-scale fishing communities the region depends on. None of these on their own would be enough, and projects that have neglected any one of them have struggled to last. Lamu shows what an integrated, locally led, long-horizon blue carbon programme can look like, and offers a template that mangrove restoration efforts from Mozambique to the Sundarbans are now studying.