NewsFix

Welcome back to NewsFix – your weekly break from doomscrolling, brought to you by Fix The News. I'm Anthony Badolato, and here are our top stories this week.

• 11 Million Life-Saving Phones
• China's shrinking deserts
• London takes a breath
• The half-billion-dollar bet to end the common cold
• And the hidden world beneath our feet

To kick things off this episode, I want you to think about the phone in your pocket.
Because last week, millions of smartphones became one of the world's largest earthquake warning systems.

When two major earthquakes struck Venezuela just seconds apart, more than 11 million phones lit up with emergency alerts moments before the shaking began, giving people time to move away from windows, get under a table or reach open ground.

And this wasn't because of an app people downloaded. It was built into the phones themselves.

Android phones contain tiny sensors called accelerometers – they're what rotate your screen when you turn your phone sideways.

If enough phones in the same area all start detecting the same movement at the same time, the system joins the dots, realises it's an earthquake, and automatically sends an alert to everyone else in the danger zone.

Another story I couldn't stop thinking about this week came from China. Its deserts are shrinking. And I mean really shrinking.

If you haven't come across the term desertification before, it's the process where fertile land becomes too degraded to support farming or native ecosystems. It's happening in a lot of places around the world.

But after decades of restoration work, China is now reversing that trend.

Over the past five years alone, more than 120,000 square kilometres of degraded land has been restored – an area almost twice the size of Tasmania. It's part of one of the biggest ecological restoration projects on the planet, known as the Three-North Shelterbelt Program.

What I really love about this story is that it isn't just restoring landscapes. It's restoring livelihoods too. More than one and a half million farmers and herders have found work through the program, earning a wage while rebuilding the land they depend on.

And it got me thinking that environmental policies often end up improving people's lives in ways we don't always expect.
Take clean air.

We tend to think of it as an environmental issue. But it's really a public health story.

London is a great example. A few years ago, the city started charging older, polluting vehicles to drive into the city centre.

They didn't ban cars altogether. They just made pollution more expensive.

And it's working. Emergency hospital admissions have fallen, including a 9% drop in serious cardiovascular cases.

But London's not alone. Across Europe, cleaner air policies have been steadily reducing pollution for the past decade. Industrial emissions are down. Traffic pollution is down.

That's a big step in the right direction because air pollution is still Europe's biggest environmental killer, responsible for around three times as many deaths as extreme heat.

But if these trends continue, cleaner air won't just mean cleaner cities. It'll mean thousands more people living longer, healthier lives.

Ok, let's do a quick whip around the world so I can give you a few more bright sparks of progress from the week.

Farms around Gaza are showing early signs of recovery. Prairie restoration in Oregon is helping rare butterflies make a comeback. Ghana has launched a nationwide campaign to tackle three horrible tropical diseases.

And a group of philanthropists has committed half a billion dollars to a bold new initiative to prevent coughs, colds, flu and other respiratory infections before they spread.

The potential payoff here is enormous. Respiratory infections cause billions of illnesses every year and come at a huge cost to both our health and our productivity. And maybe one day soon we'll stop thinking of cold and flu season as inevitable.

Finally, let's head underground where scientists have mapped the vast fungal networks that connect almost every plant on the planet – from crops and grasslands to tropical forests.

And what they found is almost impossible to get your head around. If you laid those fungal threads end to end, they'd stretch around 68 quadrillion miles. That's roughly a tenth of the distance across the Milky Way.

These underground networks also store around 300 megatons of carbon – four to six times more than every human on earth combined.
It's a pretty good reminder that some of the most important systems keeping this planet alive are the ones we never see.

That’s it from me this week but do yourself a favour and check out the full edition at fixthenews.com – there’s a big round up of EV news and more amazing stories like the new protections for Amazon headwaters in Peru, good news for England’s red kite population and lead poisoning and Australia’s free solar for lunch.

I’ll be back in your headphones next week, until then I’m Anthony Badolato and that’s your news fixed.