The end is nigh. For 2025, that is. No need to panic about the termination of all life on Earth. Not quite yet anyway.

As we come to the end of another trip around the sun, it is traditional to reflect on the past 12 months. Some crazy people even choose to look to the future – though you won’t catch me pledging to give up chocolate/go for 75 bike rides a week/style my hair to the left instead of the right. I’m not much of one for New Year’s Resolutions.

I don’t mind looking backwards though – possibly not the best trait in a world constantly moving forward, but I do not intend to be accused of failing to learn the lessons of history – usually in the hope of recalling good things that give me a warm glow.

In the world of sustainability though, searching 2025 for optimism has the feel of digging for treasure in a minefield. Let’s just say, there are some people out there who are not as keen on the green mindset as others.

The President of the United States of America, for instance – and what a for instance, not quite the same as saying Derek who runs the local corner shop has an opinion on the matter – has labelled climate change a con job perpetuated (probably) by woke liberals to (almost certainly) try and destroy all that is good about American life and business. He didn’t just say this in a rambling social media post either, even if that is fast becoming an official form of government communication on the other side of the slowly rising pond, rather at the UN General Assembly. Way to pick a medium for that message Don. Then, just to prove he was serious, his government did not send a delegation to COP 30 in Brazil. When most of the world’s governments are seeking climate change solutions and one of the biggest polluters can’t even be bothered to show up, it’s hard to feel positive.

You can add to that the outcome of COP. Despite the UN Secretary General, the President of Brazil – someone towards whom his US counterpart has far than glowing feelings – and other supposedly world leaders speaking out on the importance of delegates making solid progress, very little seemed to happen. You see, oil-producing countries are less keen than others to see the phrase ‘phaseout of fossil fuels’ included in any final legal text. Can’t imagine why.

Then we have the collapse of talks on a global plastics treaty, where a similar group of nations decided they wanted more recycling as opposed to less production. Cue lack of agreement and a wasted August trip to Geneva for all concerned (though I’m sure chocolate sales at the airport went through the roof as the delegates headed home).

We spoke about the plastics treaty with Alexandra Harrington early in the year. It seems a lifetime ago – enough time certainly for Alex to move back to Canada (no word on how big an impact appearing on the podcast had on that decision) – and the hope then was that obstacles would be overcome in the weeks and months ahead. Alex had been involved in the negotiations, and she was optimistic. Maybe in 2026? That’s a big maybe – there would be fewer bigger follies than to make that a new year pledge.

All this, and I haven’t even started on increasingly common floods, wildfires, and other climate-related disasters. Yes, optimism might be in short supply. But 2025 did offer us on Transforming Tomorrow green shoots of hope – usually provided by the guests as opposed to Jan and myself, who seem to have become even greater harbingers of doom than we were when we started this grand old adventure two-and-a-half years ago.

This was the year where we took our portable recording studio out of the country for the first time. Scotland? No, far too close and convenient. France? Belgium? A nice European feel while still being close, but still no. Instead, we visited Malaysia – I remember thinking Jan was either joking or on some kind of homegrown vegetable-induced trip when she first suggested it – and connected with friends old and new (including Jan’s academic granddaughter by the side of a swimming pool 100m up in the Kuala Lumpur skyline, in one of the most surreal sentences you will read this month).

Our week in KL (pictured above) provided us with opportunities to better understand sustainability issues in a different context, thousands of miles from home. Our friends at Sunway University were as welcoming as we could have hoped for, and they gave us hope for the present and for the future with their work, even if Don and his views of EDI did cast a pall over some of our conversations.

This was also where Jan met Nik Nazmi, the then-Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability in the Malaysian government, for the first time. If you were to ask Nik what has changed in the last 12 months, he would no doubt highlight his exit from that role. Again, the departure can be in no way linked to his coming into contact with the podcast, though if our next guest volunteers to be on the first crewed mission to Mercury soon after recording, I’ll admit we may have a problem.

Nik may have left the administration, but he continues to play an important role in the parliament, and he also took the time to repay the compliment and visit us here in Lancaster in the autumn (pictured below). He made for the perfect guest to mark 100 episodes of the podcast – how we have reached that mark with neither Jan or myself (more likely the latter) turning up dead in mysterious circumstances is beyond me – and made me smile by picking out someone other than Jan as his favourite New Zealander. You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out who it was – though I will say even Jan had little argument with his choice!

Nik spoke about the dangers posed by people like President Trump decrying climate change as a hoax, and making such opinions mainstream, countering decades of progress in accepting the reality of a heating planet. But he also brought positivity that the actions of other figures in politics and industry show that the ‘leader of the free world’ cannot stop many individuals and organisations from continuing to pursue their pro-environment, anti-discrimination agendas.

When we welcomed back Camilo Cornejo he reminded us of some legal examples we can celebrate from this year. It had been more than 18 months since we first spoke to him about environmental law. In the interim, there have been several court rulings and advisory opinions of note.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea – ITLOS, or the World Pirate Court as I’m pretty sure they meant to name it – the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice are among those to have released advisory opinions in 2025 which recognise severity of the situation we are all facing and provided support for continuing to address climate change issues in courtrooms globally (there is no word yet on whether the ITLOS courtroom is a poop deck in the mid-Atlantic with its own gangplank for guilty parties). What happens next remains to be seen, but Camilo was positive, and he seems to know his stuff, so why shouldn’t we be?!

Finally, we can turn closer to home to raise our spirits. Lancaster University’s Net Zero Energy Centre is growing by the day. It is not yet complete, but as we discovered when we spoke with Anna Cockman, it will be in the not-too-distant future. When operational, it will remove our campus’s reliance on natural gas for heating. It is a sector-leading venture, and a sign we are taking our climate pledges seriously.

There are no doubt other organisations pursuing similar projects that show how to make a difference – and I have lost count of how many guests we have had who were able to cite such positive business practice. Amid a gloom to which it is easy to succumb, it is wonderful to see. Even if certain world leaders may not approve.

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