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The Best Positive News We’re Celebrating This Week —

This year’s Glastonbury Festival in England raised £5.9 million for charity

The final numbers are in and the UK’s annual Glastonbury Festival raised £5.9 million — over $7.5 million — for charity, and those funds have been distributed to local and international organizations.

In addition to its continued support of charities like WaterAid and Greenpeace, this year’s festival made notably additional donations to War Child, UNHCR, and other charities working in conflict zones and “some of the world’s most challenging places.”

Locally, the money also supported projects at primary schools, community food banks, wildlife and the environment, and a local project that works with landowners to grow accessible produce.

Why is this good news? Massive music festivals like Glastonbury certainly don’t need to add a charitable element to the event — but it’s an incredible opportunity to gather lots of people together to make a really big difference. The festival also matched some donations, adding an extra incentive to invite people to give back and do good.

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Nine countries in Africa have seen average incomes double in the last generation

For the world’s poorest people, economic growth is of critical importance. Greater economic security opens the door to essentials like good health, shelter, access to education, nutrition, and so much more.

Most of the world’s poorest people live on the African continent. While heartbreakingly, many of these countries have seen their average incomes decline — a number of them have seen remarkable improvements.

In nine countries, including Egypt, Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda, average incomes have more than doubled since 1990.

This positive progress has made a huge difference for improvements in living standards, the share of people living in extreme poverty and child mortality rates have also declined.

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In just 3 years, AI monitoring has helped reduce neonatal and infant mortalities by 82% in Malawi

A new fetal monitoring program has been life-saving for deliveries at Area 25 health center in Malawi — the only one in the country to use it.

Donated through a partnership by childbirth safety technology company PeriGen, the software tracks a baby’s vital signs during labor and gives doctors early warnings about abnormalities. It needs less time, equipment, and skilled staff than other monitoring methods — critical in low-income countries like Malawi that face severe health worker shortages.

Since they started using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the hospital has dropped by 82%.

Why is this good news? In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffer brain damage and long-term effects like developmental delays and cerebral palsy. This technology is helping massively improve outcomes.

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The 2024 CNN Hero of the Year provides foster homes for dogs while their owners seek addiction treatment

After recovering from addiction himself, Stephen Knight realized through a friend that others often delay or forgo seeking treatment because they can’t find safe housing for their pets.

So, in 2015, he officially started Dogs Matter, a nonprofit that saves lives by providing foster care for dogs while their owners focus on addiction recovery.

Today, the organization has helped more than 1,200 dogs and their owners. Knight has a goal to make it a national model program to give more animals and humans a second chance at life.

And he just got a step closer to that goal: Knight was just named the 2024 CNN Hero of the Year and will receive more than $160,000 as well as organizational and capacity-building support to expand his work.

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Solving a major conservation gap, a revolutionary lab is breeding bumble bee babies to save them from extinction

Years in the making, scientists at the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab are now celebrating a huge milestone. Over the course of 2024, they successfully pulled off what was once deemed impossible and raised a generation of yellow-banded bumble bees.

Yellow-banded bumble bees, which live in southern Canada and much of the United States, were once a common species. Like other bee species, their populations declined sharply in the mid-1990s from threats including pathogens, pesticides, and habitat loss.

Since then, scientists have been working to give bees a helping hand. But it was only in the last decade that Woolaver and his team discovered this gap in bumble bee conservation and set out to solve it.

Why is this good news? Bees are critical to not only the survival of plants and animals — but of humans, too. They’re a key part of healthy ecosystems which sustain life, and pollinate the food you eat! While larger factors are at play in threatening bees, it’s very good news that scientists are finding a solution for this conservation gap, too.

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2,000-year-old poop samples from Yellowstone offer clues to climate change and wildlife management

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In a historic rescue mission, 1,000 endangered turtles were just saved from smugglers in Bangladesh

On Monday, December 9, the Wildlife Crime Control Unit of the Forest Department of Bangladesh responded to an anonymous tip that took them to a warehouse where they found nearly 1,000 endangered turtles at the center of an abandoned smuggling den.

It was the largest-ever rescue of endangered freshwater turtles in the history of the unit — and they arrived just in time. Amazingly, all the turtles were still alive.

All of the rescued turtles are protected under the 2012 Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act, which forbids the captivity, transportation, and sale of the endangered species.

Why is this good news? In addition to being great news for protecting endangered wildlife, tortoises and freshwater turtles are vital when it comes to helping their natural environments and keeping waterways clean, which benefits their entire ecosystem.

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Two Australian chefs turned down top restaurant jobs to serve premium meals in nursing homes

Wanting to “break the stereotype that aged care food is just a lump of food on a plate,” two chefs who’d been burned out by working in the restaurant industry brought their skills to a new endeavor.

While the nursing home where David Martin and Harry Shen work is more upscale than other offerings in Australia, it’s still a far cry from the fine dining environments they’d spent most of their time in.

Still, they wanted to use their skills to offer residents a better dining experience — and they’re no less challenged by it. The chefs have to take into consideration conditions like dysphagia, a geriatric syndrome that affects swallowing and impacts 10% to 33% of older adults.

While they realize not all facilities have the kind of staff and budget, they hope their efforts will help raise the standard of care overall.

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After years of warnings from environmentalists, the U.S. is extending threatened species protections to monarch butterflies

For years, environmentalists have been warning that monarch butterfly populations are shrinking due to warming temperatures, the use of herbicides that hinder milkweed growth, and more — and they may not survive climate change.

In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced its plans to add the butterfly to the threatened species list, giving it extensive protection. Notably, people would be prohibited from making changes to a landscape that render it permanently unusable for the species.

It will also designate 4,395 acres in seven California counties as critical monarch habitats, as it’s where they migrate for the winter.

Why is this good news? More than an iconic butterfly species, monarch butterflies are critical pollinators in the U.S. These protections will ensure that no changes to land or a landscape can occur without first considering and minimizing the impact on a key part of the ecosystems that plant, animal, and human life depend on.

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A Ukrainian woman is helping amputees rehab and rebuild their lives — and normalize disability in the country

In the nearly three years of war with Russia, at least 50,000 Ukrainians — civilians and members of the military — have lost limbs. And with more than one million people still on the front line of the war, countless more amputees are expected as the war rages on.

This reality led Olga Rudneiva to found the Superhumans Center, which has raised funds from all over the world to provide high-quality prosthetics and reconstructive surgery for amputees.

In addition to these services, the center also works to empower amputees through their injuries and traumas, amid a larger mission to normalize disability in Ukraine — because it’s simply “how the country is going to look.”

Offering supplemental support to the country’s military hospitals, it has attracted celebrity supporters and has treated more than 1,000 patients — soldiers and civilians, young and old.

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More good news of the week —

​Brown University transferred ownership of a portion of its land in Rhode Island back to a Native tribe. The move ensures that access to the land and waters extends to tribes and Native peoples of the region for whom the land has significance, as it’s the ancestral home of the leader of the Pokanoket people.

​Offering an alternative form of mental health care, the world’s first “poetry pharmacy” prescribes poems instead of pills. Customers suffering from “broken hearts” and “existential angst” are given poems by Mary Oliver and Derek Walcott in lieu of traditional prescriptions at the first-of-its-kind UK pharmacy.

​A Hawaiian crow that went locally extinct decades ago was just reintroduced on Maui. Conservationists released five of the last survivors of all the Hawaiian crow species for the first time as part of an ongoing effort to return the species to its home.

​A pair of orphaned cougar cubs were rescued and re-homed at the Oregon Zoo. The zoo is home to many animals found orphaned or injured in the wild, dubbed “second chance” residents like sea otters to black bears that serve as ambassadors for their species.

​Scientists found a trove of rare metals needed for clean energy hidden inside toxic coal waste. Scientists analyzed coal ash from power plants and found it could contain up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements, offering a huge potential source of domestic rare earth elements without the need for new mining.

​A breakthrough approach to desalination technology could benefit billions of people worldwide. Up to 36% of the world’s eight billion people currently suffer from severe freshwater shortages for at least four months of the year, and this could potentially increase to 75% by 2050.

​MIT engineers developed a biodegradable alternative to microplastics found in countless beauty products. Found across the planet and even inside our bodies, it is well documented that microplastics are a hazard impacting nearly every part of our environment — and countless consumer products.

​In a milestone for animal rights, Mexico just added animal welfare into its constitution. For years, animal rights campaigners have been drawing attention to pervasive animal cruelty and extreme confinement in the country’s growing meat industry.

​A North Carolina town just launched the country’s first climate accountability lawsuit against a utility company. It claims Duke Energy waged a “deception campaign” in order to obscure the climate hazards of fossil fuels, which led to delayed action in curbing planet-warming emissions and caused the costs of climate action to increase.

​Thanks to a lack of human activity, the gray seal population at a remote UK coastline has doubled in three years. Orford Ness, a coastal nature reserve, is now home to Suffolk’s first breeding colony of grey seals after the first 200 came in in 2021 when visitor access was significantly reduced following COVID-19 closures.

​A report found that flood protection from mangrove forests saves $885 billion in damages globally. It also found that even with declining mangrove cover in the face of coastal development and agriculture, the economic value of mangroves has continued to increase since 1996.

​Saudi Arabia is turning degraded desert sand into lush, thriving soil using an abundant local resource. It plans to plant 10 billion trees and rehabilitate over 74 million hectares of land, which requires water and soil management — which they plan to achieve through a carbon-enriched compost derived from chicken manure.

​In “a monumental win for animal rights,” New Zealand announced it will ban greyhound racing. The industry has long been criticized, had an “unacceptably high” rate of injuries, and breeders have been accused of mistreatment.

​Scotland will introduce a first-of-its-kind bill to impose harsh penalties, including jail time, for executives of major polluters. The Ecocide Prevention Bill would bring accountability for ecocide, including oil spills, mass deforestation, air or ocean pollution, mining damage, and carbon emissions.

​Relieving bottlenecks to getting solar panels installed, robots are saving time and money in the clean energy transition. Though the world almost doubled the amount of capacity installed from 2022 to 2023, it’s still too slow to keep the climate within liveable limits — solar installation must continue to grow at a record pace.