India has famously doubled its wild tiger population in just over a decade, rising from an estimated 1,706 wild tigers in 2010 to an estimated 3,682 in 2022 (around 75% of all wild tigers on Earth). An epic achievement, particularly impressive given their simultaneous human development surge of rapid population and economic growth! Now, India is also fast becoming a world leader in building wildlife crossings to ensure that human infrastructure doesn’t block habitat connectivity, with deployments on an unprecedented landscape-wide scale! India is now home to the world’s 10 largest wildlife overpasses and underpasses, all built since 2017. A corridors and connectivity strategy is working to stitch tiger reserves into larger-scale landscapes ensuring diffusion and genetic diversity, from the spreading Terai Arc in the north to the Western Ghats in the south.
And the new Delhi-Dehradun Expressway has an epic twelve-kilometer wildlife underpass (the whole road is on stilts for miles!) that has already been used by leopards and elephants since it opened in April 2026 and may yet open up a whole new forest to tiger recolonization if (when!) tigers choose to cross. India is prioritizing and investing in wildlife coexistence at an unprecedentedly early stage in its development history — when the people of Europe, America, or China were in comparable economic growth stages, their megafauna were vanishing, not reviving. Awesome work, India!
Within the extremely remote and staggeringly biodiversity-rich Torricelli Mountains region of Papua New Guinea, 266 clan leaders from 41 villages have just signed a new legally binding conservation deed agreement. Renewable every five years, it covers 125,000 hectares of land (bigger than New York City!) and completely bans commercial logging, mining, and hunting of certain unique and threatened endemic local animals like the critically endangered tenkile and weimang species of tree kangaroo! The conservation groups coordinating this new deed have also introduced water tanks, metal roofs, and solar-powered street and household lighting to the area.
A recent study calculated that the Torricelli Mountains are among the 1% of land on the planet able to prevent the most extinctions in the next 100 years if they become a protected area. Furthermore, informal early calculations suggest that the Torricellis might be home to as much as 4% of Earth’s biodiversity on 0.003% of its land area! This conservation deed is absolutely spectacular progress!
The New York Bight between Long Island and New Jersey is fast becoming a major feeding ground for rebounding populations of humpback, fin, and minke whales, as well as common dolphins. All four species are feeding on newly abundant schools of small fish after years of water cleanup efforts and fishery regulation reforms, and the bubble-feeding humpbacks often arrive here alongside new baby calves. The seas off the Big Apple are increasingly a showcase of human/cetacean coexistence. Great news!
Over the last 15 years, 196 individual Sumatran orangutans have been rewilded in the formerly orangutan-less Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve in the Aceh region of Sumatra, Indonesia. All 196 were either rescued from the illegal wildlife trade or relocated from an area where they had come into conflict with human farmers or loggers. This second-chance rewilding project is thriving, with at least 10 baby orangutans (possibly more!) already born to the Jantho ape colonists. Superb work!
Throughout the month of May 2026, the great state of California got a record-breaking 51% of all its electricity generation, including both on-grid and off-grid, from solar power! It’s America’s and the world’s largest economy yet to cross the 50% solar threshold. This has been made possible thanks to the epic Californian battery build-out: battery storage in the Golden State grew by a whopping 26,129% (not a typo!) from 2016 to 2026. A majority electrotech-powered society is here NOW in America, advancing every day! This is a real “we won” moment. SPECTACULAR news!
The Hydra solar/battery project has opened in the Northern Cape province of South Africa! With 216 MW of solar plus 500 MWh of battery storage, it’s the largest-yet single-site solar-plus-battery project in all of Africa (for now!) and will supply 200,000 households. Awesome!
Just two years after its launch, India’s nationwide PM Surya Ghar program has now helped fund rooftop and çommunity small-scale solar installation for over 5 million households (fifty lakh in India’s traditional numbering). That’s a cumulative 14.6 GW (14,600 MW) of distributed clean capacity! Over 232,000 people have received related training, and the pace of adoption is accelerating fast, with July 2026 hitting a record-high 506,000 new household installations, or about 16,328 per day. That’s more than triple the pace just nine months ago, meaning that Surya Ghar is now bringing rooftop solar to about 100,000 new households every six days! And there’s lots of room to grow, as India has over 1.4 billion people and around 300 million households. Excellent news!
An experimental project in Minas Gerais state in Brazil, recently equipped with a $3 billion investment and over 200 researchers, is working to commercialize a more sustainable jet fuel made from the oil-rich fruit of the macauba palm tree. Macauba plantations are growing, with a first harvest set for 2030, and biorefineries are under construction. Critically, it grows on degraded pasture land unsuitable for grain production (and it’s highly drought-resistant), thus avoiding the harmful competition for land with vital food production that has long bedeviled our civilization’s so-far-disappointing biofuel efforts (like the majorly harmful 2000s-era ethanol craze). As with all biofuels, burning macauba jet fuel would still releases carbon dioxide, but it’s carbon recently cycled in from the air via photosynthesis as opposed to unlocking more ancient fossil carbon. A potentially very promising new initiative!
Popular New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has implemented a sweeping new permitting reform package to make life easier for small businesses, including 50 measures eliminating or reducing a wide range of onerous licensing and paperwork requirements for everything from florists to ice cream vendors. A great example of the emerging “socialist Abundance” or “progressive deregulation” policy philosophy that this writer strongly advocates for in the field of clean energy!
Chinese eVTOL startup AutoFlight has successfully demonstrated one of their all-electric flying cars in Astana, capital city of Kazakhstan. It remained on display for the recent “Games of the Future” event in the country, and efforts are underway to systemically roll out electric urban air mobility in Kazakhstan. eVTOLs are spreading!
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