Seven quiet breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2024 you might have missed

Global temperatures rose and extreme weather ramped up, but there were also some significant breakthroughs for the climate this year. Here are seven quiet wins that may have gone under your radar in 2024.

It’s been another tough year for the climate and nature. From the 1.5C threshold set to be breached for a full year for the first time, to the disappointment of vulnerable nations at this year’s UN climate summit, it can feel like the challenge is overwhelming. Then there’s the extreme weather increasingly impacting both poor nations and rich countries.

But this year also saw some extraordinary breakthroughs for climate and nature. In case you missed them, we have rounded up some of the biggest wins for our planet from the past year.

The UK closed its last coal-fired power plant in 2024. It was a symbolic moment as the UK was the first country in the world to use coal for public power generation and the fossil fuel was the lifeblood of the industrial revolution.

On 30 September, the turbines at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power plant in Nottinghamshire fell silent and its chimneys stopped belching out fumes. The site will now undergo a two-year decommissioning and demolition process. It is unclear what the site will become after that, but one proposal is to turn it into a battery storage site.

This has already been done in West Yorkshire, at the decommissioned power plant Ferrybridge C, which has a storage capacity of 150MW, enough to power 250,000 homes. As countries aim to rapidly decarbonise their economies, many former fossil fuel power plants are proving to be promising sites for industrial-scale batteries.

Read more about the UK coal plant that became a giant battery in this story by Michael Marshall.

Renewable energy sources are growing rapidly around the world. In the US, wind energy generation hit a record in April, exceeding coal-fired generation.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the world to add 5,500 GW of renewable energy capacity between now and 2030 and to grow global renewable capacity 2.7 times compared to 2022, slightly falling short of a UN goal to triple capacity by 2030. By the end of this decade, renewable energy sources are set to meet almost half of all electricity.

The lion’s share of this growth comes from just one country: China. By 2030, China is forecast to make up at least half of the world’s cumulative renewable electricity capacity, according to the IEA. Read about China’s “bullet train for power” designed to cope with this growing renewable capacity.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, noted at a press conference that the world’s “massive growth in renewables” was mainly driven by economics rather than government policies, as renewables – especially solar – were the cheapest option in almost every country in the world. The major expansion was a “beautiful story”, he said, which he could sum up in two words: “China” and “solar”.

Back in 2021, the Ecuadorian government issued a landmark ruling stating that mining in its Los Cedros cloud forest violated the rights of nature. Another ruling in Ecuador stated that pollution had violated the rights of the Machángara River that runs through the capital, Quito.

This year, a report was published which found that such rulings can indeed help protect endangered ecosystems. Read more about Los Cedros legal personhood in this article by Becca Warner.

Beyond Ecuador, a growing number of natural features and spaces were granted legal personhood in 2024. In New Zealand, the peaks of Egmont National Park – renamed Te Papakura o Taranaki – were recognised as ancestral mountains and jointly became a legal person, known as Te Kāhui Tupua.

In Brazil, part of the ocean was given legal personhood – with the coastal city of Linhares recognising its waves as living beings, granting them the right to existence, regeneration and restoration. Meanwhile, a new treaty formed by Pacific Indigenous leaders saw whales and dolphins officially recognised as “legal persons”.

“A case filed to protect whales from cross-ocean shipping may rely on an individual claiming to be harmed because her ability to whale watch has been diminished,” says Jacqueline Gallant, a lawyer working in climate change, biodiversity and rights. “If whales themselves were recognised as legal subjects, the case could more accurately focus on the harms to the whales themselves as opposed to the individual claiming an ancillary harm in order for the court to hear the claim.”

Gallant, who works for the Earth Rights Research and Action programme at New York University School of Law, says they are pushing the boundaries of legal imagination.

“Legal personhood provides the understanding that nature and living non-human beings should be understood as subjects [as opposed to objects] – with intrinsic value and interests and needs of their own,” she says.

The North Atlantic saw a new marine protected area (MPA) announced by the Azores. When established, it will be the largest in the region, spanning 30% of the sea around the Portuguese archipelago. Half of the 111,000 sq miles (287,000 sq km) protected area will be “fully protected”, with no fishing or other natural resource extraction, according to the initiative behind the MPA. The other half will be “highly protected”.

The area contains nine hydrothermal vents, 28 species of marine mammals and 560 species of fish, among many others.

MPAs can be highly effective in protecting biodiversity if their restrictions are adequately enforced. Overall, just 2.8% of the world’s oceans are effectively protected and only 8.3% are conserved, according to a report by Bloomberg Philanthropies Ocean Initiative.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped to a nine-year low in 2024, falling by more than 30% in the 12 months to July, according to data released by Brazil’s national space research institute, INPE. Roughly 2,428 sq miles (6,288 sq km) of the rainforest were destroyed, an area larger than the size of the US state of Delaware. While this area is still vast, it is the lowest annual loss since 2015. Deforestation fell despite the fact that fires in the Brazilian Amazon increased almost 18-fold during the same time period following a historic drought.

The development comes almost two years after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office and pledged to end deforestation by 2030 and crack down on illegal logging.

A major review of conservation initiatives this year found that more often than not they are effective in slowing or reversing biodiversity loss.  The scientists reviewed 665 trials of conservation measures across the world, including several historic trials, and found they had had a positive effect in two out of every three cases.

One example of this is the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, which worked in Kazakhstan with local partners and other international organisations to save the critically endangered Saiga Antelope in the Golden Steppe grassland from extinction. The project used careful, science-based monitoring, tagging and habitat protection and restoration to ensure the best recovery for the Saiga Antelope, which numbered just 20,000 in 2003. Today, 2.86 million of the antelope roam the Golden Steppe, and it has been moved from “critically endangered” to “near threatened” status on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

In California, wildlife has benefited from decades-long drives by the Native American Yurok Tribe to replenish animals on tribal territories. In 2024, this culminated in salmon returning to the Klamath River.

After a 100-year hiatus, the fish were spotted in Oregon’s Klamath River basin, following an historic dam removal further downstream in the California stretch of the Klamath. In August, the final of four dams were removed – in what was America’s biggest dam removal project – following pressure from environmentalists and tribes. Read about the return of salmon to the river in Lucy Sherriff’s story.

Tribal members expected salmon to take months to return to the upper stretches of the river, as their numbers had been decimated by poor river health caused by the dam blocking natural water flow. But in October biologists sighted the fish in Oregon tributaries.

“What’s surprising is the sheer number of fish that are back, and the geographic range,” said Barry McCovey, senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe. “I couldn’t believe they’d been spotted in Oregon. It was incredible news to hear – it was mind boggling. When I heard, I was like ‘wait, already?!’. They’ve exceeded any expectations anyone had.”

Meanwhile, an intensive programme to reintroduce California condors, saw growing success too. The tribe has been running a release project for the vulture-like bird, which is sacred to the tribe, since 2008. On 4 October of this year, the tribe released two more of the birds, bringing the total of California condors in Yurok territory to 18.

“They’re doing great,” says Tiana Williams, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department and member of the Yurok Nation. “It’s been really exciting to watch the flock expand and change in their dynamics.”