People Fixing the World

We all know about the power of music to change our mood or to make us move. But an increasing body of evidence is showing that music has an amazing ability to help us heal. In this programme we are going to meet people working at the cutting edge of music therapy. We find out about the innovative system that uses music to help people with dementia live at home for longer. We will see how using son...

Transforming the global food system is vital in the fight against climate change. Currently, food production accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the food system also fails to properly nourish billions of people worldwide. In this edition of People Fixing The World we’re looking at high and low tech solutions to transform the ways we produce and consume food to m...

Could psychedelic drugs help in the treatment of mental health conditions? We look at pioneering research into psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. We visit a clinic in Oregon, the only state in America where the use of psilocybin in therapeutic sessions is legal and hear from one patient who says it's the only treatment she's ever had that makes a difference to her depr...

Whistleblowers - they're the good guys right? The ones who speak truth to power and have films made about the heroic stands they took? Sometimes. Often the people who speak up in the workplace are ignored or shut down. Worse still they're often bullied or harassed or end up losing their jobs. They're the ones you never hear about. This week we hear about two projects that are encouraging people to...

Schools across Senegal have discovered a clever way for children to surf the web even when there isn't any signal. They're using a special WIFI hotspot which works without an actual internet connection, so students and teachers can access all the relevant bits of the web, offline. Around the world, innovators are coming up with solutions like this - all designed to get children learning. We also h...

Australia used to be one of the most linguistically diverse places, with over 200 languages. Today, many of Australia’s indigenous languages are considered “highly endangered”. Inspired by his native language, Hebrew, Ghil’ad Zuckermann is a linguistics professor who is on a mission to revive Australia’s dead and endangered languages, painstakingly piecing them back together from historical docume...

Barcelona in Spain is famous for its beautiful streets, lined with tall apartment buildings. But the architecture is a problem for many people who have lived for years in upstairs apartments but who now find the stairs unmanageable. In 2008, a survey found that in one district there were 300 people who could not leave their homes alone. A group of volunteers decided to do something about this and...

On this edition of People Fixing The World we meet people who’ve helped overcome long-standing cultural biases to create better outcomes for everyone. In India we hear about the social media campaigns which have helped city dwellers in Bengaluru see those who pick waste from rubbish dumps not as dangerous and dirty but as invaluable recyclers. In Nigeria we meet a traditional healer and a health w...

From beavers in the UK to bison in Romania and jaguars in Argentina, ecologists around the world are reintroducing animals that once flourished in particular areas. The theory is, if done correctly, they can boost biodiversity and restore ecosystems with benefits ranging from reducing forest fires to tackling invasive species. But the strategy is controversial. Opponents say some species are no lo...

The Amazon is the largest forest in the world, spread across nine countries in South America and home to 47 million people. It’s crucial for the planet’s biodiversity and in the fight against climate change. But vast numbers of trees have been cut down for logging, construction, mining and farming. On this edition of People Fixing The World we meet those who are making a living from the Amazon whi...

This week we have a host of great ideas inspired by solutions we've told you about in 2023. We find out how scientists are using fake birds to help populations of seabirds to recover. By putting out model birds in restored habitats they trick the real ones into nesting there. Then we have the heartwarming tale of Theo – a man in his seventies - and Bickel the dog. We look at how dog sharing can de...

Landfill sites are an icon of our wasteful society and the harm we cause to Planet Earth. But around the world, people are trying to make these filthy places a little bit better. We visit the human-built island in Singapore made of burned waste that has become a thriving ecosystem. And in France, we hear how gas leaking from landfill sites is being collected as a source of energy. Presenter: Myra...

Loneliness affects millions of people around the world and can have a significant impact on our mental and physical health. In the Netherlands, they are taking the problem seriously, with a national coalition of organisations all trying to bring people together and build connections. We visit a youth club teaching teenagers how to overcome shyness and social anxiety. Plus, we drop in on a soup-mak...

How do you stop people chopping down precious rainforest? In the Indonesian part of Borneo, researchers for a conservation charity discovered that local people were chopping down the rainforest around them for an incredibly understandable reason – they needed to pay for medical treatment for themselves and their children. So they started a project that would hopefully protect the forest and help t...

Every year the world produces 400 million tonnes of plastic – the same weight as all the humans on earth. Only a small proportion of this is recycled, and this isn’t proper recycling but “downcycling” – the new plastic is of a lower quality, meaning that almost all plastic eventually goes to waste. But now French company Carbios is using enzymes to break plastic down into its chemical building blo...

Millions of women around the world lack access to safe and hygienic menstrual products. But there are people trying to change that. We meet the British student who learned to sew in lockdown and started making reusable sanitary pads for refugees. She’s helped distribute tens of thousands of pads and is now training refugee women in Lebanon how to make money by sewing the pads themselves. We hear a...

In the farming community of Los Negros in rural Bolivia, the river is their life and livelihood. So when that river started to dry up, it made life very hard. They blamed the villages upstream for not looking after their precious water. This conflict could have turned ugly. But with the support of a local charity, what came out of it instead was a ground-breaking agreement. After years of negotiat...

Heroin users in Scotland are being trained to spot when someone is about to overdose and to step in and help. The training – which includes lessons on how to use the antidote naloxone - is often led by people who have themselves been addicts. Taxi drivers and police officers are also being trained, and naloxone being widely distributed, as part of a push to save as many lives as possible. Reporter...

In the midst of a crisis, sometimes the solution you need isn’t obvious. Today we meet the inventors who found fascinating fixes amid the chaos and destruction of disasters. We visit the hospital that was painstakingly constructed inside a train, to treat Ukrainian civilians in a war zone. We follow a team in Fiji who have created a mobile workshop, designed to travel to remote villages after natu...

Meet the oceans’ unsung hero - the humble sea cucumber. An animal in the same family as starfish that looks like a lumpy sausage and lives on the ocean floor could help with some of the impact of global warming, pollution from fish farms and damage from the fishing industry that are threatening some of the oceans most important ecosystems. We meet the Australian researchers using drones to count t...

More than 400 people in Ireland took their own lives in 2022. In Limerick, helicopters are often heard flying above the city in search of missing people in the River Shannon. But in response to this tragic situation, a group has sprung up to patrol the Shannon in the evenings to speak with people who are feeling desperate. Katie Flannery joins them on a Saturday night to see how they work and to h...

Artificial intelligence can sometimes provoke fear and anxiety. Will it take away our jobs? Will it take over the world? So it’s important to recognise some of the good things AI is being used for. We look at how AI chatbots are helping people tackle anxiety, how AI is being used in Africa to lower infant mortality and even speak to the team using AI to try and communicate with bats. Presenter: My...

We eat millions of tonnes of coconuts every year - with the dense white flesh of the fruit making a tasty snack and the juice a refreshing drink. But the inedible husk and shell go to waste – and it’s this part that innovators and entrepreneurs around the world are now putting to work to solve a whole host of problems. In Sierra Leone, a personal tragedy was the catalyst for young entrepreneur Alh...

Earthquakes strike suddenly, leaving death and destruction in their wake. But around the world, people are trying to do what they can to make them less deadly. We hear from Haiti, where a seismometer developed for hobbyists is now being used by citizens to build the country’s first earthquake risk map. Over in Zurich, we meet the scientist using tennis balls to buffer buildings in poor countries f...

Heart disease and other cardiovascular diseases are the biggest killer in the world, causing 18 million deaths globally every year. Cardiologists and heart surgeons try to manage heart disease with stents, surgery and drugs, but the organ itself does not heal. Finding a way to regenerate heart tissue has become a holy grail for medicine. Now there is new hope from a strange and pioneering techniqu...