People Fixing The World

Bananas are one of the most popular fruits on the planet - more than 100 million tonnes of them are eaten every year. But on banana plantations on four continents, a deadly fungus is creeping through the soil and destroying the plants. Some say the end is nigh for the banana. But from Australia to Colombia and from the Philippines to the Netherlands, work is going on to stop that happening. We meet the farmers, scientists and gene technologists trying to find a way to save the fruit.Reporter: Daniel Gordon (Photo Credit: BBC)

Billions of tonnes of goods are moved by lorry every year – everything from food and clothes to building materials, electronic gadgets and toys. Most heavy-duty vehicles run on diesel and they account for a quarter of the EU’s CO2 emissions from road transport. But making eco-friendly lorries and trucks is challenging. Big vehicles need big batteries, which currently take too long to charge and take up too much room. So Germany is trying out a few alternatives. The eHighway system enables lorries to connect to overhead electricity cables, just like trams and trains. And while lorries are connected, smaller on-board batteries could be charged up too to power the final leg of a journey. The country is also investing in another technology: hydrogen. Fuel cells convert the gas into electricity and the only emissions from these vehicles are water vapour and warm air. Seventy-five hydrogen fuel pumps have already opened across the country. Reporter: William Kremer

Video games are often blamed for time-wasting and violence, but there’s a group of people proving this stereotype wrong.We meet the scientists behind a game designed to speed up finding a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and we speak to a teenager who plays it because “it’s something I can do to help people in my spare time”. Citizen science projects like this have had some remarkable successes, and gamers have been credited with significant research such as figuring out the structure of a protein that shares similarities with HIV.Fans of this model believe gaming has a huge part to play in the future of problem solving.Produced by Kathleen Hawkins(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

The city of Vaasa in western Finland has built a reputation as a centre of innovation, where energy companies are working together to try to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Here, there’s a quiet conviction that climate change can be stopped and a belief that technology emerging from this area will help us make the shift to renewable forms of energy. We meet the people behind a giant engine that can run on a variety of non-fossil fuels, hear about a portable plant that turns waste into energy and speak to scientists developing man-made fuels to replace oil and gas. We also check out a company creating a new type of battery which it hopes will one day be able to store enough power to meet the needs of a whole city. Reporter and producer: Erika Benke (Photo credit: BBC)

Imagine a grocery shop selling all your basic goods at a discounted price… and if you buy enough you also get free health insurance. It might seem too good to be true, but stores like this have been introduced at some factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Social entrepreneur Saif Rashid is trying to get better health care to some of the millions of garment factory workers who are on low wages. For them, to lose a day’s pay by taking time off sick can be disastrous and affording decent health care is almost impossible. Now, with this scheme, they can get health insurance at the same time as getting discounts on their shopping. We find out how it’s changed some workers’ lives and why some people don’t take up the opportunity.Reporter: Chhavi Sachdev Producer: Tom Colls(Photo Credit: BBC)

Where there are humans, there’s waste. About two billion tonnes of garbage was produced in 2016, and the amount we generate is increasing. A lot of it ends up in unmanaged dumps or landfill sites. Much of it can’t be reused or recycled, but instead of seeing it go to “waste” some cement factories are using it to create energy. In this episode, People Fixing the World also looks at how tourists can help conservationists protect animals, such as lions, cheetahs and hyenas. All they have to do is share their holiday photos. Reporters: Nick Holland and Jamie Ryan(Photo Caption: Getty images)

If you have a cardiac arrest you need help immediately to have any chance of surviving. That’s why emergency call operators ask questions specifically designed to identify the condition, ideally within 90 seconds. Panicked and emotional callers don't always give simple answers, though, and evidence suggests cardiac arrests go unidentified in at least a quarter of emergency calls. In Denmark, a team of computer engineers is using new technology to listen in on emergency phone calls and look for clues in the conversation that the operator may have missed. We visit an emergency call centre in the Danish capital to see the system in action and find out if a computer really can detect cardiac arrests faster than humans working alone. Producer / Reporter: Sam Judah Photo Credit: Getty Images

It's estimated that a person dies from a snakebite every five minutes. Many more people face life-changing injuries, losing limbs and consequently their livelihoods. Antivenoms are expensive to make and are in short supply, particularly in remote communities where they are needed the most. And what’s more, snakebites in different parts of the world need different types of antivenoms. Many of the current treatments available in sub-Saharan Africa have been developed from snakes in Asia, but antivenom made to treat Indian snakebites won’t work as well on people bitten by snakes in Africa.Now a new research facility in Kenya is trying to develop better antivenoms from African snakes. And they've launched a motorbike snakebite ambulance service too, to get people who have been bitten to hospital fast.(Photo Credit: BBC)

For the past 20 years, police chiefs and policy makers around the world have been fascinated by an idea: that violence spreads through cities like a disease, with patterns of clustering and transmission, and opportunities to inoculate communities against it.Violence-reduction programmes, influenced by epidemiology, have been implemented in Chicago, Glasgow and - most recently - London. But before these initiatives, a link between violence and disease was made by a Colombian doctor called Rodrigo Guerrero. When Guerrero became mayor of Cali in Colombia in 1992, the city was in crisis. It was the height of a war between the Cali and Medellin drug cartels with the homicide rate reaching a shocking 120 per 100,000 people. Guerrero’s approach was not to wage a war against the cartels, or to cave into corruption. Instead, he used his knowledge as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist to gather data about the exact causes of homicide, make hypotheses, and try interventions. “I was no longer an epidemiologist, but

In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of wells were dug across Bangladesh to give people access to cholera-free water. But this led to what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history, worse than Chernobyl. That’s because the water in the wells wasn’t tested for arsenic. Decades on, it’s a major problem. The WHO says more than 35 million Bangladeshis have been chronically exposed to arsenic in their drinking water, and about 40,000 die of arsenicosis every year. The field test for it is inaccurate and prone to human error. Most Bangladeshis drink from wells in their back yards which haven’t been tested for years, if at all. But now a gadget is being developed which will allow anyone to test a well cheaply, instantly and accurately. The scientific key to it is a tiny enzyme, found inside a bacterium affectionately known as Mr Tickle, which was discovered in an Australian gold mine.Reporters: Chhavi Sachdev and Jo Mathys(Photo Credit: BBC)

Pollution, overfishing and oxygen depletion are damaging coastal waters across the world. Often fish and other marine life are the victims, but scientists are using one surprising creature to help solve the problem – the oyster.Oysters eat some chemical pollutants and fight algae blooms, which can have a damaging effect on biodiversity.A group of teachers and scientists in New York is trying to reintroduce a billion of them into the harbour to make it a healthier, cleaner environment and strengthen the shoreline.Another team based in France is strapping wires to oysters’ shells around oil rigs to monitor how often they open and close. That gives them vital information about how pollution levels are changing.Reporter/ producer Jamie Ryan(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Concrete is the most used man-made product in the world but it comes with a heavy environmental price. Between 5% and 7% of the world's annual carbon emissions come from producing the cement that glues concrete together. Most of these climate-changing gases are released when a vital ingredient, limestone, is melted down in the manufacturing process. But one company has devised a new type of cement that only solidifies when you pump carbon dioxide into it. The gas becomes locked in as it turns to concrete. This is similar to the way carbon dioxide has been stored in rocks by nature over millions of years. As Nick Holland reports, it's one of the solutions the industry could use to mitigate its impact on the environment. (Photo Credit: BBC)

For the growing number of working women in Dhaka, commuting to work can be a challenge. The traffic is terrible and cars and taxis are expensive. Public transport is not only inconvenient, it is sometimes unsafe - many women face unwanted sexual attention on buses. So after his wife was harassed by a taxi driver, one young entrepreneur set up a motorbike ride-share service with a difference. Not only are the customers all women, the drivers are too. Reporter Chhavi Sachdev meets some brave women finding new ways to navigate Bangladeshi traffic and society.(Photo Caption: Kobita on her scooter / Photo Credit: BBC)

For most of human history, pumping carbon dioxide into the air has come free of charge. Burning fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution and powers most industries to this day. But all that carbon stays up in the atmosphere and dealing with the consequences won’t be free. The cost of climate change stretches beyond the lives lost in natural disasters. There will be a huge economic cost - to pay for sea defences, put out forest fires and care for millions of climate refugees. Around the world, governments and businesses are finding different ways of putting a price on the carbon that industries pump out. They’re trying to change how the global economy operates, by making industry pay for the harm their carbon emissions cause. Reporter: Tom Colls(Photo Caption: A cloud and money / Photo Credit: Getty Images)

In the US most people who are charged with a crime can’t afford expensive lawyers and investigators to prepare their case. The public defenders who represent them usually have heavy workloads and limited resources. Family and friends would often like to help but don’t know how. So a group in California is trying to make things fairer by teaching them how the legal system works and explaining what they can do. It shows them how to dissect police reports, put together a social biography for the defendant and get crucial evidence for their lawyer. Started in San Jose, California, the model is now being used across the US and beyond.We hear from people whose lives have been transformed by this approach. Presenter: Nick Holland Producer: Claire Bates(Photo Credit: Silicon Valley De-Bug)

It’s estimated that more than 100 million girls under the age of 18 will be married in the next decade. One country that’s trying to end the practice of child marriage is Ethiopia. There, the Berhane Hewan programme, meaning ‘Light for Eve’ in Amharic, promises families a solar-powered light if their daughter remains unmarried and in school until she’s at least 18. This approach is known as a conditional asset transfer. The solar lanterns enable girls to study after dark and they can also be used to charge mobile phones, which is particularly useful in remote areas with no electricity. Girls are taught to make money from the lanterns by charging neighbours to power up their mobile phones too. People Fixing the World visits Dibate, a small village in western Ethiopia. More than 600 girls in this part of the country have received a solar lamp. Reported by Lily Freeston Produced by Ruth Evans and Hadra Ahmed(Photo Credit: BBC)

Each year, mental health practitioners from around the world visit Trieste in Italy to see what they can learn from the city’s approach to mental illness.In 1978, Trieste led a ‘revolution’ in Italian mental health care by closing its asylums and ending the restraint of patients. Today the city is designated as a ‘collaboration centre’ by the World Health Organization in recognition of its pioneering work.Reporter Ammar Ebrahim visits Trieste to see how the system works - from the informal community centres where people can drop in and stay as long as they need, to the businesses that offer career opportunities for those who have been through the system.We hear about the city’s policy of ‘no locked doors’, and ask how Trieste deals with patients other societies may deem ‘dangerous’.Presenter: Tom Colls Producer: Sam Judah(Photo Caption: “Freedom is therapeutic” written on a wall in Trieste / Photo Credit: BBC)

On average, one in eight children in the UK has a mental health disorder – that’s about three children in every classroom. Yet there are just 4.5 psychiatrists for every 100,000 young people - that’s fewer than most other European countries. With the UK’s mental health provision for children so stretched, help often ends up coming from families and schools. One school in London has actively taken up this challenge. Highgate Primary School has developed a unique system in which dozens of children can get one-to-one sessions with trainee therapists, while some struggling parents are also offered support. The school has redesigned its playground so children can find areas that fit their mood, and it has given over more time to activities such as gardening, cooking and drama.Today’s programme features some of the children that have benefited from these ideas – but can other schools replicate them?Reporter: William Kremer (Photo Credit: BBC)

Neighbours in the US are using cameras that read car number plates to record vehicles driving down their streets. When there’s a crime they check through the footage and pass any leads on to the police. But critics say the Flock Safety system, run by a private company, is open to abuse and warn of privacy concerns. Is it too risky to encourage residents to do police work, or a realistic response to under-resourced law enforcement?Presenter: Tom Colls Producer: Claire Bates(Photo Credit: BBC)

More than five billion people around the world don’t have access to safe, affordable surgical care. It has been a big problem in Ethiopia where most specialist doctors are concentrated in the cities, contributing to high rates of maternal mortality. In 2009 the Ethiopian government began training Integrated Emergency Surgical Officers. Health workers, such as nurses and midwives, are taught to perform emergency operations in remote, rural clinics where there are no surgeons. It was the first programme of its kind and is seen as a model for other developing countries. More than 800 surgical officers have now completed the three-year Masters programme and are performing hundreds of caesareans and other emergency procedures each year. People Fixing The World follows one of them, Seida Guadu, as she operates to try to save the lives of a mother and her unborn child. Reporter: Ruth Evans Producers: Lily Freeston and Hadra Ahmed(Picture credit: BBC)