Six years after A Life on Our Planet

This is the proposal where the news is genuinely good. Renewables passed coal in the global electricity mix for the first time in 2025 — about 34% of generation against coal's 33%. Solar PV alone delivered the largest one-year increase from any source on record outside of post-crisis rebounds. Battery storage capacity grew roughly 40% in a single year.

The catch: we sit at about 5.15 TW of renewable capacity against the COP28 pledge to hit 11 TW by 2030, and IRENA does not think we make it without significant acceleration. AI data center demand is propping up natural gas — and in some places coal — muddying the trajectory.

As of April 2026 the UN reported the ocean finally hit 10% protected — six years late on the previous target. The current goal is 30% by 2030, and only about 3.3% is actually effectively protected. The rest still allows activities like bottom trawling, or has not been implemented on the water at all.

2025 was the biggest single-year jump in nearly a decade, and the High Seas Treaty entered into force in January 2026. Both real wins. But the math from 10% to 30% in four years is brutal.

The hardest of the three pillars, and the one moving slowest. The technology exists, the modeling is real — but the OECD-FAO outlook through 2034 has poultry consumption continuing to climb, expected to reach 45% of all meat protein. Alternative meat sales actually fell 2.3% in 2024 as inflation hit and retailers pulled back on plant-based offerings.

The flexitarian middle is real — about 46% globally per ADM's 2025 survey — but absolute meat consumption is still rising, not falling.

The mechanisms here are well-validated. Costa Rica reversed its deforestation. The demographic transition through girls' education and healthcare works wherever it is funded. These are the slowest-moving levers in the plan, but also the most durable.

The proposal was never a single intervention — it was the long compounding work of giving land back, expanding the protected estate, and letting the global population peak earlier and lower than it otherwise would.