Victoria’s mining regulator has granted a 20-year licence for a mineral sands mine near Horsham in Victoria’s west, despite local government and community concerns about the site’s environmental impact.
Every few years, the elders of Muluk, a tiny coastal community in Papua New Guinea, close a stretch of their reef to fishing. They do this to give these underwater gardens room to breathe, grow and replenish.
We first stumbled on this community-led approach back in 2001. These reefs appeared to be faring remarkably well compared to those further down the coast. This piqued our interest and led us to conduct a global search for other reef ecosystems that were seemingly defying the odds.
While collecting data from nearly 1,700 reefs worldwide, we found over a dozen more sites that had way more fish than expected. These reefs are examples of “bright spots” – places where nature is exceeding expectations given their environmental and social pressures, such as overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change.
So what are bright spots and why do they matter for conservation? Our new study offers some answers.
Bright spots may seem like lucky exceptions to the otherwise bleak rule of ecological decline. We are, after all, living through a sixth global mass extinction of our own making. Today, the risk of plants and animals going extinct is hundreds of times higher than before humans roamed the earth.
Against this depressing backdrop, conservationists have mostly focused on failure: identifying urgent environmental threats with the hope of blunting their worst effects.
But there’s a second, lesser-known approach commonly used across medicine and public health that asks the opposite question: what systems are working against the odds and what lessons could they offer? This is what we call the positive deviance or “bright spots” approach.
Read more: There are bright spots among the world’s coral reefs – the challenge is to learn from them
Since we first brought the bright spots concept to coral reefs in 2016, other scientists have applied this approach to a myriad of other systems and species worldwide.
In West Africa, scientists have identified several critically endangered chimpanzee communities that are thriving, despite steep declines in the wider regional population. These include those living in pristine, inaccessible habitats. However, some are in places where nearby villagers uphold traditions that discourage hunting and make room for people and chimpanzees to co-exist, such as Boé in Guinea-Bissau.
In Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, several First Nations communities have helped the threatened grizzly bear population thrive by placing Indigenous stewardship at the centre of conservation efforts. This includes introducing a trophy hunting ban under both Indigenous and provincial law.
Off the coast of Tasmania in southern Australia, an unlikely alliance of scientists, wildlife managers, and policymakers has protected the vulnerable shy albatross, a species plagued by the threats of disease and global warming. This involved several innovative interventions, including treating albatross chicks for external parasites and building artificial nests for shelter.
Until now these case studies, while heartening, have not offered any clear or concrete wisdom for conservationists to apply elsewhere. That’s where our new study comes in.
We analysed more than 70 studies across the fields of ecology, conservation, sustainability and development to find out how bright spots are identified and what factors give rise to them. We found there are various ways to identify bright spots, with some scientists using statistical models to quantify ecosystems or species that are faring better than expected. Other research relies on experts who shared anecdotes of unexpected success.
Read more: Back from the brink: how genome research is helping the recovery of the Chatham Island black robin
The reasons why a bright spot might exist were even more numerous and varied. As we examined all these bright spots – ranging from hydro-power development to carnivore conservation, food security and more – three patterns kept resurfacing.
Action
We found bright spots often benefited from a specific intervention that was both good for nature and fit for purpose. In the case of coastal communities in Papua New Guinea, this was the unique reef closure system that village elders implemented as needed.
Ability
Bright spots were most common where communities had the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. In Papua New Guinea, strong social ties between youth and elders ensured the village’s reef closure system was passed from generation to generation.
Architecture
When it comes to bright spots, the social and environmental context of a place matters. In Papua New Guinea, the rights of coastal communities to use and manage marine resources are recognised in the country’s constitution. This gives local villagers the power to stop other fishers from depleting their reefs.
Bright spots aren’t the product of magic or chance. They arise in places where the interactions between people, place and practical action enable species and ecosystems to thrive. The existence of bright spots doesn’t make the extinction crisis any less real or urgent. But once we know where and how to find them, they remind us decline is not the only story.
Read more: We must rip up our environmental laws to address the extinction crisis
Joshua Cinner receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Geographic Society.
Bing Lin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australia’s High Court rules in favour of a Hunter Valley community group in a landmark climate ruling that could redraw how fossil fuel projects are approved in Australia.
A quarter-century ago, genetic modification stood as one of the most contentious political and environmental issues in New Zealand.
Debate around the technology produced a high-profile royal commission of inquiry, a 20,000-strong protest march through central Auckland and the politically explosive “Corngate” controversy, in which the government was accused of covering up the possible planting of GM corn.
Today, GM has advanced dramatically, but the arguments surrounding it remain remarkably familiar.
A bill introduced by the National-led government to modernise the regulation of genetic technologies drew more than 15,000 submissions last year.
Its progress stalled after coalition partner New Zealand First withdrew its support, citing inadequate safeguards and potential export risks, pushing any further action beyond the election.
With long-standing calls for reform unlikely to be answered anytime soon, we analysed more than 1,600 texts – mostly media articles – to trace how GM public debate has evolved over the past three decades.
We found some arguments have dominated the debate while others have been surprisingly absent, particularly cultural and ethical questions.
At the height of the GM debate in the 1990s and early 2000s, supporters emphasised its potential economic benefits and the costs of “missing out”.
Critics, meanwhile, warned GM could threaten New Zealand’s “clean, green” image and harm trade. Those concerns remained prominent in subsequent decades, perhaps because economic arguments were among the few criticisms taken seriously by GM supporters.
But during the 2010s, we found supporters largely moved away from economic arguments. Where economics was mentioned at all, it tended to be one item towards the end of a longer list of potential benefits.
Instead, arguments in favour of GM increasingly focused on environmental benefits – particularly tackling climate change and controlling pests – as well as applications in medicine and poverty alleviation.
One reason may be that newer technologies such as CRISPR, which allows scientists to more precisely edit DNA, have opened up applications beyond agriculture. Another may be a desire to distance GM from concerns about corporate influence that dominated debate in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Then, from 2023, the debate came full circle. Economic arguments returned to the centre of the case for GM reform, in line with the government’s wider emphasis on economic growth.
Environmental and social benefits have remained prominent too. As the arguments for GM have expanded to cover an increasingly wide range of potential benefits, those against it have become narrower, concentrating heavily on economic risks.
Economics is not the only recurring feature of the GM debate. Over the past three decades, both sides have offered competing claims about what the science says and how much risk GM poses.
But other important questions have received far less attention, including M?ori values and rights.
While these were occasionally raised by GM critics in earlier decades, we found M?ori perspectives were rarely taken seriously by supporters. Our data suggests this may now be beginning to change.
The ethical and moral implications of GM have likewise received relatively little attention in recent years.
Supporters increasingly argue it would be “immoral” not to use GM because of its potential social and environmental benefits. But these arguments are generally made without much deeper discussion of the ethical questions involved.
Critics have been more likely to raise ethical concerns over the years, but even they rarely dwell on them. We found this even in cases where ethics might have been expected to take centre stage, such as the disbandment of the Bioethics Council in 2009.
Discussion of GM regulation has also tended to be narrow. Particularly since the late 2000s, existing rules have largely been presented as either adequate or too restrictive.
Framing regulation simply as a question of “more” or “less” leaves little room to consider why particular decisions should be made, how they should be made, and who should have a say.
Similarly, our analysis – and the current stalemate over National’s Gene Technology Bill – points to the problems with placing too much focus on economic considerations. The result can be a debate reduced to competing technical claims and polarised arguments about whether GM itself is simply good or bad.
Our research suggests New Zealand needs a much wider conversation – particularly one that gives greater attention to the cultural and ethical questions that have too often been missing.
Sylvia Nissen has received research funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, as part of Endeavour research investigating gene editing and invasive wasps, and is a Deputy Director of Bioprotection Aotearoa.
Alexandra Palmer has received research funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
Raven Cretney has received research funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Bioprotection Aotearoa Centre of Research Excellence.
Renewables now contribute more than 40% of the electricity generated in Australia’s main grid. Twenty years ago, that figure was under 10%. Despite this growth, the federal target of 82% by 2030 is slipping out of reach.
This comes down to one reason: uneven investment. Australia is now the world’s third-largest market for grid-scale batteries, while solar farms are proceeding steadily.
But the real problem is wind. Supply chain shortages, financing issues, construction cost increases and political changes have made wind projects much more difficult to build. And that’s going to be a problem – Australia needs more wind projects to fill the gap as old coal plants retire.
It’s not all bad news. Last week, a large new wind farm in Western Australia secured the necessary financing to go ahead. But more needs to be done.
Huge change has already come to Australia’s power grids.
But the clean energy rebuild isn’t done yet. An estimated A$106 billion of investment will be needed by 2050.
At present, these funds are thin on the ground. The 2026 survey by the Clean Energy Investor Group found the percentage of major investors rating Australia’s clean energy sector as “attractive” fell from 69% in 2025 to 58%, while the percentage regarding it as “somewhat unattractive” more than doubled from 8% to 19%.
That’s a problem. Wind projects have to be financed years before they earn any revenue. On average, wind projects take over a year longer to be built than solar. These longer build times mean, with higher interest rates, these projects have higher upfront costs.
Investors warn that the Coalition’s retreat from net zero threatens a recovery in confidence. The National and Liberal parties have ended their commitment to net zero.
Projects that began under one set of policy assumptions can run into trouble if these change.
Australia’s renewable slowdown isn’t uniform. Solar and batteries are going strong, while wind farms are struggling. This year, few new wind farms have reached the stage where construction could actually begin.
Wind is crucial. The Australian Energy Market Operator is counting on wind to generate 47% of the total power from renewables in the main power grid by 2030.
Once wind power is built, it becomes one of the most efficient and reliable sources of energy available. In windy areas, turbines can turn day and night.
But trade data shows Australia’s imports of battery storage roughly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025, while imports of wind turbines and equipment have fallen sharply.
This matches investment figures: in 2025, investment in batteries rose almost 70% to $4.8 billion, while wind investment fell almost 60% to $2.6 billion. Solar farm investment dropped a little, falling 5% to $1.9 billion.
Solar farms are typically smaller and faster to build. They’re also easier to finance in stages. Wind farms tend to be larger, take longer to plan and build and are harder to finance in stages.
Economics pose another challenge. To be viable, wind farms need electricity prices above $100 per megawatt-hour. But the market is currently offering around $60.
Then there are construction costs, which have risen sharply in recent years. Turbine prices rose almost 40% between 2020 and 2022. Other challenges include the cost of new transmission lines, and a shortage of skilled workers.
Then there’s politics. In February last year, the Queensland government began requiring wind farm backers to do significantly more in terms of full impact assessments and public consultation. It also gave third parties more rights to appeal. In May, the state government axed the large, conditionally approved, Moonlight Ridge wind farm.
Unsurprisingly, no new wind farm applications have been lodged in Queensland since.
It’s common for wind projects to take about five years to become reality. If investors are reconsidering, Australia may not have enough clean energy in the pipeline to replace increasingly unreliable coal plants slated for retirement.
Victoria’s Yallourn power station will close in 2028, while Australia’s largest coal plant, Eraring will close in 2029, after a two-year extension. Queensland’s Gladstone plant may be retired in 2029, six years early.
These three large plants produce about 30 terawatt-hours a year between them – roughly twice South Australia’s total annual power generation.
If the present wind drought isn’t resolved soon, it will leave a large gap that won’t show up in energy statistics until it’s too late to fix.
If these worrying investment trends continue, wind will produce less power than authorities expected. Solar and batteries could take up some of the slack, but not all.
Overcoming these doldrums won’t be easy. But it has to be done. To do this, investors need certainty. That will mean giving clearer commitments to long-term climate policy at a national level.
More predictable state planning rules would help, as would allowing contracts to better reflect real construction costs.
Australia has come a long way down the path to a renewable energy future. But it’s not yet job done. To complete the transition, we will need wind.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.