People Fixing the World

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...

From crops that grow faster to rice that could stop children going blind - the world is full of genetically modified products waiting to come onto the market. Genetic modification techniques in plants have huge problem-solving potential, but are often clouded in controversy. Most scientists say GM food is safe, yet some consumers and environmental campaigners remain unconvinced. This week we look...

In Bangladesh, there’s an app helping female farmers to get a fairer price for their crop. At the market, women farmers often face sexism, and struggle to sell their produce for what it’s worth. But by making the seller anonymous, they’re able to sell more and reap the profit they deserve. We’ll also hear from other projects around the world trying to bridge the gender gap in agriculture- and inve...

The fast growth of solar power is a success story in the fight against climate change. However, in some countries progress is being stymied by opposition to large solar farms in the countryside. But enterprising people are trying to keep the solar momentum going, by finding less obvious places where we can harness energy from the sun - like lakes, farms, car parks, office windows and even outer sp...

How can we stop plastic flowing into our oceans? Dutch inventors have one solution, pulling plastic from the water using a ‘net’ made from bubbles. Also on the programme - how sound could be used to help restore coral reefs in Australia. Scientists found playing the sounds of a healthy reef under water, could attract fish back to the site. They hope to combine this with coral seeding to rebuild re...

All across the world, invasive species are on the march. These are plants and animals that take over new areas, throwing nature out of balance. If left unchecked, they can destroy local ecosystems, drive native species to extinction - and put local livelihoods at risk. But people have been finding innovative ways to combat these invaders… like eating them! In Belize, we look at how encouraging loc...

In cities across Japan and the Philippines, an app called Tekkon is making data collection cool. It's a Pokemon GO-style game which pays people with cryptocurrency if they track down broken infrastructure – such as missing manhole covers and tangled electrical wires. The same technology that makes the cryptocurrency possible - blockchain - is also being used in South Africa to improve the lives of...

How do you care for someone properly in a hospital or care home if you don’t know who they are? With US hospitals and care homes seeing fast turnovers of staff, many clinicians don’t get the chance to learn their residents’ backstories. This can lead to patients feeling isolated and misunderstood. Meanwhile, staff miss out on valuable insights which could be incorporated into treatment plans or us...

As climate change leads to global temperature rises, cities around the world are being faced with extreme levels of heat. This can bring whole cities to a halt, disrupt key infrastructure, and for the most vulnerable in society heat can be a killer. But where there’s a problem, innovation is never far behind. We meet the people who are trying to find solutions – from urban designers finding inspir...

A young scientist has developed a white powder which gives waste soil concrete-like properties. Gnanli Landrou grew up in Togo, helping his neighbours dry out soil to make bricks, and his big dream is to help people like them build stronger, cheaper, houses. But the European building industry is also excited about his new, low carbon building material. We talk to Gnanli about his ambitions for thi...

Is it possible for palm oil plantations, wildlife and the rainforest to happily coexist? Products containing palm oil, including soaps and cosmetics, are used by billions of people worldwide. While the industry is credited with reducing poverty in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, it has also contributed to mass deforestation. In Malaysian Borneo, only small pockets of pristine rainforest rem...

How can you get kids to school safely in a way that’s good for the environment and gives them some exercise too? We find out how kids from Spain to Scotland are joining together in long convoys known as “bike buses”. Teachers and parents accompany the joyful multitude of cyclists, which pick up children from pre-determined stops along the way. And in Kenya, we look at a different kind of transport...

US shopping malls, once a mainstay of American life, are in decline. Forty malls have closed since 2020, while more than 230 department stores have closed in the same time period, according to Green Street, a real estate analytics firm. But where there is change, there is also opportunity. After Burlington High School in Vermont had to close its doors because dangerous chemicals were found, the sc...

As humanity expands further and further into the wild areas of the world, they are increasingly coming into conflict with the creatures that live there. One of those animals is the elephant. When tensions flare with these huge creatures, lives can be lost on both sides. We investigate the people trying to resolve these conflicts in a peaceful, bloodless way - like the farmers placing beehives on t...