Stay ConnectedDiscover the people and the projects trying to make the world a better place.
A weekly programme looking at common challenges around the world and the creative ways people are trying to tackle them.
Presenter Myra Anubi speaks to reporters, experts and innovators to investigate how effective different solutions are, share their successes and inspire listeners with what is possible.
Copyright: © (C) BBC 2022
The city of Vaasa in western Finland has built a reputation as a centre of innovation, where energy companies are working together to try to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.
Here, there’s a quiet conviction that climate change can be stopped and a belief that technology emerging from this area will help us make the shift to renewable forms of energy. We meet the people behind a giant engine that can run on a variety of non-fossil fuels, hear about a portable plant that turns waste into energy and speak to scientists developing man-made fuels to replace oil and gas.
We also check out a company creating a new type of battery which it hopes will one day be able to store enough power to meet the needs of a whole city.
Reporter and producer: Erika Benke
(Photo credit: BBC)
Imagine a grocery shop selling all your basic goods at a discounted price… and if you buy enough you also get free health insurance. It might seem too good to be true, but stores like this have been introduced at some factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Social entrepreneur Saif Rashid is trying to get better health care to some of the millions of garment factory workers who are on low wages. For them, to lose a day’s pay by taking time off sick can be disastrous and affording decent health care is almost impossible.
Now, with this scheme, they can get health insurance at the same time as getting discounts on their shopping. We find out how it’s changed some workers’ lives and why some people don’t take up the opportunity.
Reporter: Chhavi Sachdev Producer: Tom Colls
(Photo Credit: BBC)
Where there are humans, there’s waste. About two billion tonnes of garbage was produced in 2016, and the amount we generate is increasing. A lot of it ends up in unmanaged dumps or landfill sites. Much of it can’t be reused or recycled, but instead of seeing it go to “waste” some cement factories are using it to create energy.
In this episode, People Fixing the World also looks at how tourists can help conservationists protect animals, such as lions, cheetahs and hyenas. All they have to do is share their holiday photos.
Reporters: Nick Holland and Jamie Ryan
(Photo Caption: Getty images)
If you have a cardiac arrest you need help immediately to have any chance of surviving. That’s why emergency call operators ask questions specifically designed to identify the condition, ideally within 90 seconds. Panicked and emotional callers don't always give simple answers, though, and evidence suggests cardiac arrests go unidentified in at least a quarter of emergency calls. In Denmark, a team of computer engineers is using new technology to listen in on emergency phone calls and look for clues in the conversation that the operator may have missed. We visit an emergency call centre in the Danish capital to see the system in action and find out if a computer really can detect cardiac arrests faster than humans working alone. Producer / Reporter: Sam Judah Photo Credit: Getty Images
It's estimated that a person dies from a snakebite every five minutes. Many more people face life-changing injuries, losing limbs and consequently their livelihoods. Antivenoms are expensive to make and are in short supply, particularly in remote communities where they are needed the most. And what’s more, snakebites in different parts of the world need different types of antivenoms. Many of the current treatments available in sub-Saharan Africa have been developed from snakes in Asia, but antivenom made to treat Indian snakebites won’t work as well on people bitten by snakes in Africa.
Now a new research facility in Kenya is trying to develop better antivenoms from African snakes. And they've launched a motorbike snakebite ambulance service too, to get people who have been bitten to hospital fast.
(Photo Credit: BBC)
For the past 20 years, police chiefs and policy makers around the world have been fascinated by an idea: that violence spreads through cities like a disease, with patterns of clustering and transmission, and opportunities to inoculate communities against it.
Violence-reduction programmes, influenced by epidemiology, have been implemented in Chicago, Glasgow and - most recently - London. But before these initiatives, a link between violence and disease was made by a Colombian doctor called Rodrigo Guerrero. When Guerrero became mayor of Cali in Colombia in 1992, the city was in crisis. It was the height of a war between the Cali and Medellin drug cartels with the homicide rate reaching a shocking 120 per 100,000 people. Guerrero’s approach was not to wage a war against the cartels, or to cave into corruption. Instead, he used his knowledge as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist to gather data about the exact causes of homicide, make hypotheses, and try interventions. “I was no longer an epidemiologist, but a violentologist,” he recalls.
In this programme Dr Guerrero gives reporter William Kremer a tour of his city and explains his approach.
Reporter: William Kremer
(Photo Caption: Dr Rodrigo Guerrero / Photo Credit: BBC)
In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of wells were dug across Bangladesh to give people access to cholera-free water. But this led to what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history, worse than Chernobyl. That’s because the water in the wells wasn’t tested for arsenic. Decades on, it’s a major problem. The WHO says more than 35 million Bangladeshis have been chronically exposed to arsenic in their drinking water, and about 40,000 die of arsenicosis every year. The field test for it is inaccurate and prone to human error. Most Bangladeshis drink from wells in their back yards which haven’t been tested for years, if at all. But now a gadget is being developed which will allow anyone to test a well cheaply, instantly and accurately. The scientific key to it is a tiny enzyme, found inside a bacterium affectionately known as Mr Tickle, which was discovered in an Australian gold mine.
Reporters: Chhavi Sachdev and Jo Mathys
(Photo Credit: BBC)
Pollution, overfishing and oxygen depletion are damaging coastal waters across the world. Often fish and other marine life are the victims, but scientists are using one surprising creature to help solve the problem – the oyster.
Oysters eat some chemical pollutants and fight algae blooms, which can have a damaging effect on biodiversity.
A group of teachers and scientists in New York is trying to reintroduce a billion of them into the harbour to make it a healthier, cleaner environment and strengthen the shoreline.
Another team based in France is strapping wires to oysters’ shells around oil rigs to monitor how often they open and close. That gives them vital information about how pollution levels are changing.
Reporter/ producer Jamie Ryan
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
Concrete is the most used man-made product in the world but it comes with a heavy environmental price. Between 5% and 7% of the world's annual carbon emissions come from producing the cement that glues concrete together. Most of these climate-changing gases are released when a vital ingredient, limestone, is melted down in the manufacturing process. But one company has devised a new type of cement that only solidifies when you pump carbon dioxide into it. The gas becomes locked in as it turns to concrete. This is similar to the way carbon dioxide has been stored in rocks by nature over millions of years. As Nick Holland reports, it's one of the solutions the industry could use to mitigate its impact on the environment.
(Photo Credit: BBC)
For the growing number of working women in Dhaka, commuting to work can be a challenge. The traffic is terrible and cars and taxis are expensive. Public transport is not only inconvenient, it is sometimes unsafe - many women face unwanted sexual attention on buses. So after his wife was harassed by a taxi driver, one young entrepreneur set up a motorbike ride-share service with a difference. Not only are the customers all women, the drivers are too. Reporter Chhavi Sachdev meets some brave women finding new ways to navigate Bangladeshi traffic and society.
(Photo Caption: Kobita on her scooter / Photo Credit: BBC)
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