City rivers, canals and docks are often walled in stone and steel, with no shallow edges where plants can root, birds can nest or fish can shelter. The water is busy, but biologically almost empty.
Planting trees is easy. Keeping them alive through their first dry summers is the hard part, and on eroded, rocky or arid land many saplings die before their roots reach moisture.
Replanting a degraded forest by hand is slow, costly and often impossible on steep or remote ground. Planting a few fast-growing species is quicker, but it does not bring back a living forest.
Most flood maps show rivers bursting their banks. But in cities, much of the damage now comes from sudden cloudbursts that overwhelm drains and send water down streets and into basements, often far from any river.
Every monsoon, roads in Indian cities vanish under water, trains stall and commutes stretch into hours. Usually the response starts only after the rain: pumping, rerouting and cleaning up.
Floods cause more damage than almost any other natural hazard, yet for much of the world nobody can say which streets, farms or factories will go under in a 1 in 100 year storm, let alone in a warmer climate.
Harbour porpoises are small, shy and almost impossible to count from a boat, especially at night or in rough seas. Yet European law requires countries to know where they are and protect them.
Food companies are being asked to prove that their farms are good for nature, yet very few farms measure biodiversity at all, because hiring an ecologist is expensive.
For years, ecologists who wanted to record bats, birds or frogs in the field needed recorders costing around a thousand dollars each, which limited most studies to a handful of sites.
Small electric workboats, born in a Hong Kong university lab and now built and run from Bengaluru, that pull plastic, temple offerings and invasive weed out of India's ports, rivers and lakes.
A Navarra-founded company that coats native tree seeds in a protective capsule and fires them from drones over burned hillsides, promising fast, cheap reforestation that scientists say still needs proof.
A battery-powered aquatic drone, about the size of a small car bonnet, that swims into dock corners and canal edges to scoop up bottles, bags and weed before they drift out to sea.
A Swedish battery saw with the power of a 40cc petrol model and a clutch that protects the chain and motor, aimed at thinning crews and arborists who want less noise, less vibration and no exhaust.
Disease-resistant tree clones grown by the million at a nursery in Telangana and sold to farmers, who grow them on their own land and sell the wood back for paper and board.
A Lund-made app that films trees as a forester walks through a stand, builds a 3D model on the phone and returns stem diameters, basal area and timber volume in minutes.
