Every day, it seems that creative and forward-thinking people are responding to the rising demand for inventions that are both useful and ecologically conscious. Some products seem to be straight out of Black Mirror—with their sleek, modern designs—while others are still in their clunky trial stages. We’ve compiled a list of ten green creations that give us hope for the future of our planet. 1. The Ocean Cleanup 23-year-old boy genius, Boyan Slat, is the founder and president of The Ocean Cleanup, a foundation which is dedicated to developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic.  The Dutch inventor is in the works of creating a 62-mile underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash—amounting to 150 million pounds of trash—from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 10 years. Once removed, much of that plastic could be properly recycled. 2....

  In 2016, nearly 200 countries signed up to the Paris climate accord, which set individual targets aimed at preventing global temperatures from rising above 2C this century – and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C or less. Despite such promises, many countries are still not on track. Some of the globe’s biggest emitters – the US and Russia – have either left or not yet ratified the treaty. As mass strikes united the globe in its fight against our climate crisis, we look at what some of the countries with the largest stake in our environment are either doing – or not doing – to save our planet. The US Since Donald Trump’s administration took office, the US president – who famously called climate change a “hoax” – has done plenty to reverse his predecessor Barack Obama’s pro-environmental policies. Mr Trump has often pursued the interests of industries such as coal and car manufacturing at the expense of the environment in his pursuit of jobs gr...

  Healing the planet starts in your garage, in your kitchen, and at your dining-room table. Nations around the world are upping their game in the fight against climate change, even as President Trump recently announced the U.S.'s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. And despite this reckless move, American mayors, state leaders, county officials, governors, major companies, and millions of citizens across our country have pledged that they're "still in" when it comes to the agreement, and supporting the goal of limiting future warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Even better, a new initiative by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg gives the urban layer of this movement a boost. He’s asked mayors from the 100 most populous cities in the country to share their plans for making their buildings and transportation systems run cleaner and more efficiently. The 20 that show the greatest potential for cutting the dangerous carbon pollution that’s driving climate ...

  The urgency of actions to recover from the COVID-19 crisis must not deter long-term climate objectives. The recovery efforts must seize the opportunity to increase the resilience of our society, especially to climate impacts. Despite the ambition of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to keep global warming well below 2°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide are still growing. Global temperature is now over 1°C higher compared to the preindustrial era. If adequate mitigation strategies are not introduced, global warming could reach 3°C or more by the end of this century. The death toll from extreme heat could be 30 times higher and economic damages from flooding, drought and storms could be 15 times higher than today. The COVID-19 crisis will put a dent in the climate targets if the restoration efforts are focused on returning to a pre-crisis status quo. Now is the time to "rebuild better". This is the moment to introduce ambit...

From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world's people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday. With the world's population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences. "If there is no water, people will start to move. If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," warned Kitty van der Heijden, head of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry. "It's threats like these that keep me up at night," the diplomat told a webinar hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a U.S.-based research group . One in four children worldwide will be living in areas of extremely high water stress by 2040, researchers estimated....

Environmental disasters are by far the biggest risks facing the world over the next ten years, posing a significant threat to social and economic stability, according to a survey by the World Economic Forum (WEF). For the first time in the history of the survey, environmental catastrophes make up the top five risks that some of the world’s most influential people and companies believe are most likely to happen, the WEF’s annual Global Risk Report for 2020 said. The WEF survey, now in its 15th year, interviewed 750 global experts and decision-makers, who sounded the alarm on the devastating impacts of climate change. Most of the stakeholders interviewed for the survey said economic divisions and geopolitical disorder are their greatest concerns. But younger respondents said they were most concerned about environmental issues, both in the short and long terms. Extreme heatwaves, the destruction of ecosystems and deteriorating health due to pollution are the top short-term risks, accordin...

School pupils, youth activists and communities around the world have turned out for a day of climate strikes, intended to underscore the urgency of the climate crisis even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Social distancing and other Covid-19 control measures dampened the protests, but thousands of activists posted on social media and took to the streets to protest against the lack of climate action from world leaders. Strikes were scheduled in at least 3,500 locations around the globe. Friday’s strikes – some in the form of mostly socially distanced physical marches on the streets, and some purely online meetings – were on a smaller scale and far more subdued than last year’s September week of action, in which at least 6 million people around the world were estimated to have taken part. Greta Thunberg led a strike in Sweden, which was limited to 50 people by the country’s lockdown laws – “so we adapt”, she tweeted, with a picture showing strikers more than 2 metres apart. The ...