POSITIVE NEWS - What went right this week: Dutch bees buzz back, and more positive news
Posted 30th April 2021 • Written by www.positive.news • • • • •
Efforts to boost bee numbers in Dutch cities appeared to yield results, a malaria vaccine showed promise and a UK supermarket started selling pre-loved clothes, plus the week’s other positive news
Bees buzzed back to Dutch cities
Small-scale conservation projects in Dutch cities are sowing the seeds for a bee recovery, according to a nationwide bee census. Some 11,000 volunteers took part in the annual survey, which appeared to show an increase in bee numbers in urban areas. By contrast, the Dutch countryside had become a “desert” for the imperilled pollinators, researchers warned.
Recent years have seen the Netherlands subtly adapt its cities to make them more hospitable to pollinators. Bee hotels in parks and gardens, green roofs on bus stops, and wildflowers planted along grass verges are among the tactics deployed to address declines in bee numbers.
Koos Biesmeijer, head of Naturalis, a biodiversity charity behind the survey, said those efforts appear to be paying off. “We think numbers are increasing in cities and that’s because of awareness among people,” he told Positive News, adding that many urbanites had made efforts to attract bees.
The Dutch bee census is now in its fourth year and Biesmeijer warned that it was too early to draw definitive conclusions. However, he said the initial results were encouraging. “If everybody does their bit, then you can really transform landscapes. If you put in habitats for them, bees can thrive.”
A malaria vaccine showed promise in trials
Scientists believe that they might have found an effective vaccine for malaria, a disease that kills more than 400,000 people annually, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa.
The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77 per cent efficacy in a phase two trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months. The search for a malaria vaccine has been going on for more than a century.
Lynsey Bilsland, from the charity Wellcome, which helped fund the research, said: “This is an extremely promising result showing high efficacy of a safe, low-cost, scalable vaccine designed to reach the huge numbers of children who are most at risk of the devastating impact of malaria. While further studies are required, this marks a significant and exciting step forward.”
Conservation can help keep the peace – report
Conservation is an effective peacekeeping tool. That’s the conclusion of a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which found that armed conflicts are less likely to happen in protected places.
The report examined the interplay between the environment and armed conflict. It found that in areas where there were fewer stresses on the land, the chances of unrest were lower.
Juha Siikamäki, IUCN’s chief economist, said: “As environmental degradation and climate change intensify, it is becoming increasingly important to factor in the links between conflict and nature when formulating security, development and environmental policy.”
While peace prevails in many conservation areas, the IUCN warned that some of the world’s most endangered species, including the eastern gorilla (pictured), were at risk from conflict.
Oscars hailed as the ‘most diverse ever’
Long lambasted for lacking diversity, the Academy Awards finally changed the narrative this week, with women, people of colour and older actors among those scooping gongs at the 2021 Oscars.
Half of the acting awards went to people of colour (Youn Yuh-jung and Daniel Kaluuya); two of the five directing nominees were women (Chloé Zhao, pictured, and Emerald Fennell); and two were people of colour (Zhao and Lee Chang Isaac). Unusually, three of the acting winners were over 60: Anthony Hopkins (83), Frances McDormand (63) and Youn Yuh-jung (73).
Instead of prompting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to trend online, as it has previously, this year’s Academy Awards were praised for being the ‘most diverse ever’. It follows recent attempts to make the Oscars more inclusive.