A Faster Way to Find Illicit Fins

By releasing fish into the Chicago River, the city of Chicago aims to help clean up its ecosystem, as the fish hopefully will eat the river's excess algae.

One-pill-a-day generic AIDS drugs for poor countries are hard to make because each ingredient is patented by a different pharmaceutical company. The Patent Pool provides a way for companies to donate their intellectual property safely.

The chute is where a river of Silky Pork begins flowing to Tokyo, swift and steady in a logistical marvel that delivers choice cuts of fresh pork across the globe. Negotiations on a new trade deal catch the attention of the Ivey brothers and other North Carolina hog farmers.

Warming water has led to the collapse of coral reef systems in the western Indian Ocean, essential to fisheries, protecting shorelines, and reducing beach erosion and sea-level rise. Marine scientists from Nature Seychelles, as part of an international project to protect and restore the reefs, are promoting varieties of coral that they have found to be resistant to the rise in temperature.

Farmers in Vietnam face rising sea levels but rejected the city's water engineering projects. They prefer gradual measures to cope with climate change so scientists have allowed the farmers to steer the conversation.

Louisiana and Vietnam both need affordable solutions to rising sea levels. Leaders from Vietnam visited Louisiana to compare ideas.

The World Conservation Union estimates that 40 percent of the more than 40,000 species it tracks on its Red List are close to extinction and this problem requires humans to change their behavior to fix it. Rare’s the Pride Campaign uses social marketing to attract attention and communicate the conservation message between local communities and government entities. The Pride Campaign has been replicated around the world for different conservation efforts to protect biodiversity.

New water management technology implemented along the Columbia has significantly helped the fish population - specifically salmon - return to healthy numbers and has restored much of the community and industry that revolves around the river, including for native peoples.

The United States can outsource certain kinds of "microwork," such as accurately digitizing large swaths of information, to developing countries without taking jobs from Americans ― if it’s done carefully, and ethically, as some organizations are working to do. As the author Robert Wright has argued, we no longer live in a zero-sum world, where one person’s, or one country’s gain, must be another’s loss.

Clean water and healthy ecosystems are becoming increasingly difficult to come by. With floating islands and other inventions, eco-entrepreneur Bruce Kania thinks that biomimicry - such as reconstructing wetlands and growing biofilms - can tackle the toughest of water problems.