Mali’s “Moringa Queen” wins UN honors for restoring dry land and creating rural jobs
Rokiatu Traoré, who leads the Herou Alliance social enterprise in Mali, was named a Changemaker at the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Action Awards in Rome. Her group trains farmers and plants drought-tough moringa and baobab trees, then turns leaves, flowers and seeds into teas, powders, soaps and other products sold locally and abroad. Since 2021 the alliance has planted about 150,000 trees and trained more than 2,000 smallholders, with a long-term aim of restoring millions of hectares of degraded Sahel land.
Source: Mongabay →
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A Louisville neighborhood builds its first community-land-trust homes to keep housing affordable
Residents of Smoketown, a historic Black neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, fought investor “We buy houses” signs by forming a community land trust that keeps the land under local control while homes sell at affordable prices. With city land-bank plots and nonprofit partners, the trust recently finished its first seven houses and has already picked the next seven sites. More than 300 such trusts now operate across the U.S., and Smoketown’s model shows how neighbors can lock in lasting affordability instead of watching vacant lots turn into speculation.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful →
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New South Wales creates a 478,000-hectare Great Koala National Park
After more than a decade of campaigning and a marathon parliamentary debate, NSW lawmakers passed legislation establishing the state’s second-largest national park between Kempsey and Grafton. The Great Koala National Park stitches existing reserves together with more than 178,000 hectares of former state forest and Crown land, aiming to protect koalas and more than 100 other native species. A federal carbon-credit registration for ending logging in the park’s forests helped clear the final hurdle for the long-promised reserve.
Source: ABC News →
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Barbados eliminates mother-to-child transmission of HIV
The World Health Organization certified that Barbados has eliminated mother-to-child HIV transmission as a public health problem after an independent review. From 2022 to 2024, no babies born in Barbados were reported newly infected that way, and roughly 98% of pregnant women received antenatal care, HIV testing and—when needed—antiretroviral treatment. Free, confidential services for every pregnant woman, regardless of nationality, put Barbados among a growing group of countries and territories recognized for this milestone, with the Americas leading the list.
Source: PAHO/WHO →
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Rural North Carolina paramedics test electric aircraft that take off like drones
In sprawling Hyde County, North Carolina, EMS crews are piloting Pivotal’s single-seat BlackFly, an electric vertical-takeoff aircraft that can race toward 911 calls at about 60 mph and land close to the scene. During a trial, a medic corrected a wrong GPS address from the air and began care roughly 20 minutes before ground ambulances arrived. The aircraft won’t replace ambulances or helicopters, but early users say its quick launch, simple controls and lower operating costs could shrink rural response times while the wider eVTOL industry still chases air-taxi dreams.
Source: Grist →
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