First up...

🥘 The United Nations World Food Programme says it has run out of food in Gaza, where Israel has blocked humanitarian aid deliveries for seven weeks. Smaller organizations are still helping, like World Central Kitchen, which said it’s stretching the last of its supplies.

🌎 The Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists working on a flagship report to determine how global warming is impacting the U.S. — hopefully, these experts will find the same urgent, enthusiastic support as those working on an (also dismissed) nature assessment.

Public Health

Nepal is a global leader in electric vehicle imports — and the shift is cleaning up toxic air pollution

Part of a larger, ambitious goal for electric vehicle sales, last year more than 70% of four-wheeled passenger vehicles imported into Nepal were electric — one of the highest rates in the world.

And there’s a new hope emerging as a result of the increasing popularity of EVs, both two- and four-wheeled: reducing chronic air pollution. The city is ranked among the world’s most polluted cities, with fine particulate matter regularly 10 to 20 times higher than WHO guidelines.

Air pollution accounted for nearly 19% of deaths in Nepal in 2021. The increasing use of electric vehicles could help clean up that air, bring it within safe, recommended pollution levels — and help people living in the city live for 2.6 more years.

Even better: Almost all of Nepal’s electricity is clean, generated by hydropower, and readily available — making the shift to electric vehicles even more impactful.

→ Read more​

More Good News

​A homeless shelter run by students is providing housing where a college priced students out of dorms and campus housing. Colleges often don’t have enough room to accommodate all of their graduates, forcing students to look for housing off-campus — where affordable housing is increasingly difficult to find.

​Engineers designed a self-repairing, “living” concrete out of fungi and bacteria to address the environmental impact of construction. Cement alone is responsible for nearly 8% of global CO₂ emissions, and the team of scientists believes their innovation could help pave the way for more sustainable and adaptive building systems.

​In “a sign of hope,” four months after the Los Angeles wildfires, wildlife is returning to the burn area. A group of volunteers is monitoring the area with trail cameras in an area behind Altadena — previously slated for development into a sports complex — to showcase the biodiversity of the area and take “inventory of everything that was valuable.”

Housing

Tiny cottages modeled after a children’s storybook are bringing neighbors together in a small New York town

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Clean energy

Wind and solar capacity have surpassed coal-powered thermal energy in China for the first time

While China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases that drive climate change — it’s also installing almost twice as much wind and solar energy capacity as every other country in the world combined.

Currently, around 60% of China’s energy comes from coal — but that won’t be the story for long. Not only is it working to achieve peak carbon emissions by 2030, it just reached a major clean energy milestone.

China brought its total installed capacity of wind and solar power to 1.482 billion kilowatts, officially surpassing the installed capacity of thermal power, which is mainly coal, at 1.451 billion kilowatts.

→ Read more​

More Good bits

🛍️ The guide you’ve been waiting (and asking) for: We’ve got Target alternatives (that aren’t Walmart or Costco).

⚖️ You don’t want to find yourself on this spreadsheet.​

🦮 Here’s hoping for longer TSA lines!​

🎤 Corey Booker is making good trouble again (and he brought friends). (TikTok)

🚙 Who is … the coolest girl dad we’ve ever seen. (TikTok)

What’s good?

I would move into that storybook tiny cottage community tomorrow.

What’s one thing you wish your community had that it does not currently?

A book club? Easier public transit access? Reply and tell me!

— Megan