Nature is in crisis. According to the UN, one million of the world’s estimated eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. The European Environment Agency’s five year report on the state of nature noted in 2025 that more than 80% of protected habitats are in a poor or bad state, with 60-70% of soils degraded. This matters because healthy ecosystems are what underpin water and food security and the raw materials we need to survive. The nature crisis is here in the UK too – it doesn’t just affect habitats abroad. The UK’s state of nature report in 2023 revealed that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth; for instance nearly one in six species are threatened with extinction from Great Britain.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. People and communities across the globe are determined to restore and support nature to thrive – and momentum is growing. And in even better news, the ways we are restoring nature are getting more diverse and creative – helping to bring in new voices, platforming new ideas and centring inclusion and equity. Today, we share three stories from Climate Curious that reveal the breadth of nature restoration efforts to inspire you!
How a streamer sparked a new way to engage with wildlife conservation
A few years ago, if you spotted Maya Higa streaming on Twitch and YouTube, she would probably be singing or playing music. Today, she’s known for her incredible work helping to protect and conserve animals in Texas and educate folks about wildlife conservation more widely. She founded the Alveus Sanctuary in February 2021 as both a wildlife sanctuary and as a virtual education center to leverage the power of streaming and online communities to better protect wildlife. In her Climate Curious quickie, How a streamer built an online wildlife sanctuary, Maya shares how the journey started:
“I was a zookeeper in college and I was also a falconer… One day I got a call from a zookeeper friend about Bean – a red-tailed hawk who was hit by a car. He needed rehabilitation, so we picked him up and we brought him home to my house. And because I was a live streamer at that time as well, I started live streaming his rehabilitation process. People got to know him really well, and it felt like they were rehabbing him with me because they were watching the whole process. Then I eventually released…and hopefully he’s still flying out in the mountains.”
Seeing how much people loved following Bean’s rehabilitation, Maya decided to start ise streaming to encourage support for wildlife rehabilitation more widely. As she said, she realised: “doing it [wildlife education & rehabilitation] virtually through streaming meant the animal could reach way more people without having to meet any of them.” At Alveus Sanctuary, she can now stream a whole tonne of different species and animals including wolf dogs, foxes, emus, crows, reptiles, monkeys and bugs – and in settings safer for many animals without losing that human interaction and support. Overall Maya’s mission is to educate folks on wildlife conservation, show why it matters and hopefully make sure they support these animals beyond just liking a post online:
“Our next step for the sanctuary is building out this new facility. It’s a research and recovery institute, so we’re gonna be breeding endangered species at the facility for reintroduction into the wild. We’re gonna start with endangered wolves, and we’re gonna put live cameras on them. People will fall in love with those wolves, and then we’ll breed them at our facility and then reintroduce them, release ’em into the wild.
Our goal is to put cameras on them in the wild as well, so then they’ll be able to follow their entire journey from birth to release into the wild. And if there is a threat to that land that those wolves are living on, where these people know and love them, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world that will freak out and that’s conservation.”
This idea to leverage online communities to support wildlife conservation efforts is scalable too, Maya argues. There are plenty of zoos already set up that can widen their audiences by adding in live streams and other wildlife sanctuaries where normal visitors aren’t possible, but online ones are. Overall, Maya believes that content creators have a really powerful role to play in education, nature and conservation.
“I think that people in industries are just starting to learn the power of content creators and influencers for education. One of the things that makes me such a good educator is that I don’t just stream education. I do a lot of lifestyle content… and because people see me as a relatable person, it makes the conservation work feel accessible… It’s like the difference between reading something in a textbook and listening to your friend talk about something they’re really excited about. It’s night and day.”
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Android
How joining a community group ended in a legal ruling to help protect nature and people
When you think of drilling for oil and gas, you probably imagine big offshore drilling or international gas pipelines. So when Sarah Finch realised that there was oil drilling happening in her local neighbourhood she was pretty shocked. Six miles away from her house in Surrey, there was a site called Horse Hill with two oil wells. In 2019, the oil developer requested permission to expand the site to add four new oil wells, which was initially granted by Surrey County Council. However for many years local community groups and residents, including the Weald Action Group, as well as environmental campaigners, had been campaigning to stop drilling altogether at Horse Hill and any expansion. This all changed with the ‘Finch’ ruling, which stopped this expansion in its tracks, along with stopping many other potential fossil fuel production projects across the UK.
In her Climate Curious episode, How a local petition became a national climate victory, Sarah Finch explains what they the Finch ruling is and why it’s helping to stop fossil fuel production across the UK:
“Anybody who wants to dig a coal mine, drill for oil, drill for gas, they have to go through a process called an “environmental impact assessment”, where they look at all the possible effects this might have on the environment. What the Finch ruling means is that they have to look at the effects of actually burning the fuel that they’re going to produce… It sounds very obvious that one of the impacts of producing oil is that you burn it and it affects the climate, but up until the Finch ruling that had been generally overlooked.”
The Finch ruling changed the process that the government has to follow, so it does not mean there is a blanket ban on fossil fuel production in the UK. However, the Finch ruling makes it much more difficult for expansions or new sites to be approved – as now the environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels are included. Once the Finch ruling went through the Supreme Court, Sarah explained that ‘planning permission for that one site at Horse Hill in Surrey was overturned’ and if they wanted to expand the site they would have to apply for planning permission again.
Similarly, Sarah explains, there were a number of other sites with legal challenges pending and ‘within a month, the government had said it wouldn’t defend the permission for a coal mine [Whitehaven]. And then the next month, they wouldn’t defend the permissions for the Rose Bank and Jackdaw oil and gas sites in the North Sea.’ The impact of these permissions dropping meant other ‘various smaller onshore sites were overturned or applications withdrawn’. The impact of the Finch case really is far reaching and sets a precedent for reducing fossil fuel production in the UK.
One part of Sarah’s story that stands out when we consider it through the nature restoration lens is the impact of drilling on the nature and local landscape. The Weald (an area of Surrey) is 500 square miles of woodlands, where oil developers were keen to transform the region into a series of oil wells. The impact on nature – such as water pollution and earthquakes – was part of their original concerns along with the concerns of the impacts of burning the fuels itself. In addition, Sarah and the Weald Action Group consisted of local people who came together to protect their local areas in particular:
“The first meeting of the people that are now in the Weald Action Group was probably on a roadside in Balkam, in Sussex when we were all there protesting against the plans to drill at Balkam, which is like 10 miles down the road from Horse Hill.”
The group consists of local people with a lot of different skills and backgrounds – as Sarah says the ‘right mix of people’ to help the group be so successful. Her advice to anyone looking to protect their local area or perhaps take action more widely is to organise in community with others – ‘don’t try to do it the lonely way’. We’re also delighted to see that Sarah’s work was recognised by the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Each year, the prize is awarded to grassroots environmental champions from around the world who are doing incredible work to protect our planet. Sarah was the 2026 winner for Europe
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Android
How protecting a rare bat species evolved into stopping wildfires and supporting local communities in Nigeria
In Nigeria’s 24,700-acre Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, a rare short-tailed roundleaf bat whose global population is less than 1500, is trying to survive – and their biggest threat is wildfire. Iroro Tanshi experienced this first hand when she barely escaped a wildfire in the forest while looking and researching these bats. Iroro is a Nigerian tropical ecologist and conservationist who joined Climate Curious to talk about the unusual pathway she and her colleagues took to preserve the habitats that her favourite bats lived in.
In the episode, How Iroro Tanshi took on Nigeria’s wildfires to save this rare bat species, Iroro explains how she watched a fire burn for three weeks straight until the rains came and was wracking her brains with her colleagues to think about what they could do about these wildfires and to help bats. As she says:
“So wildfires are not just a problem for bats. They also affect local livelihood because they destroy farms. The fires originate on farms. So if one person burning trash on their farm or trying to bring down a tree or clean their land for the planting season is reckless…that fire spreads.”
When she and her colleagues started engaging with the local community they explained to Iroro how the fires are getting increasingly worse and most importantly they didn’t know when they should be burning. Iroro describes that as a ‘mini eureka moment’ where they realised if they can help people know when to burn and help manage any initial outbreaks then they can really help reduce wildfires. Iroro explains how this works in practice:
“We only just facilitate and provide technological support by models that say, it’s a high risk day – you shouldn’t burn on your farm, or it’s a low risk state – you should burn. So we provide that and communities communicate it amongst themselves.
We don’t have helicopters or planes to put out fires when they are in mountains and in large forest areas. So we have to stop them at the source.
We have a team of forest guardians who respond to wildfires in each community. 10 people in a group have backpacks with water – about 20 litres – and because fires in tropical rainforests can be slow creeping, people can basically walk up and just put it out with a high pressure pump.”
Iroro believes a fundamental reason why this approach works is because the community is onboard and they lead on it. As she says, “they are the custodians” and she and her colleagues don’t want to be “lording things over the community”. You may be wondering how the bat conservation comes back into the picture. Iroro agreed that the process has been ‘sort of backwards’ as by solving the problem the community faced they’ve been able to create more curiosity about the bats and their role in protecting the local ecosystem too and especially in farming too:
“Bats play lots of ecosystem services like controlling insect pests and providing food security in that sense.. everything from the cassava that’s eaten in the village to the chocolates that get shipped out of these communities to around the world, bats helped to reduce insect pests. They also provide a lot of pollination services, because they can fly long distances.”
Iroro has been endlessly fascinated by bats and hopes to scale the project going forward into other regions across West Africa. We were delighted to see Iroro recognised by the Goldman Environmental Prize this year. As they conclude, Iroro’s Zero Wildfire Campaign has safeguarded the biodiversity of 24,700 acres within the sanctuary, protected the short-tailed roundleaf bats and ‘secured the crops and livelihoods of roughly 27,000 people in 16 surrounding communities.’ Incredible work that you can discover more about here.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Android
Above, we’ve outlined just three of many stories of people around the world who are restoring nature but through such different means – whether that’s leveraging online communities, using the law or sparking local grass-roots action. These three guests show the power of thinking creatively about issues, how to effectively work with local people and groups and how to consider issues holistically – often acting across traditional issue areas or types of work.
At Climate Curious, we will continue bringing you new ideas on how you might help restore nature in your life – but most importantly show there is no one size fits all to protect and love nature!
Lead photo credit: Etinosa Yvonne, Goldman Environmental Prize
