Good Morning!

Before you close the laptop and head into your weekend, I want to share four stories (yes, today I have four instead of three) that I think deserve a little more attention than they've been getting.

From a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea being locked into legal protection, to the world slowly winning a battle against hunger that most people don't even know is happening.

There's also a story about the world's heaviest parrot making a remarkable comeback, and one that might just change how you think about breastfeeding as a global health tool.

Grab your coffee and read on!

In Papua New Guinea, logging and agricultural expansion have long threatened some of the most biodiverse land on the planet. The Torricelli Mountains in the country's northwest are particularly critical. They shelter species like the critically endangered Tenkile tree kangaroo, which exists in only a small pocket of the world.

For years, protecting this habitat has been a race against time.

So here is the good news!

Several local clans (266 clan leaders across 41 villages) whose ancestral land covers this forest have signed a legally binding conservation deed, committing to protect the Torricelli Mountains from deforestation and habitat destruction. This is not a government-top-down decree. It is a community-led commitment, which conservation experts say is the most durable kind. When the people who live on and depend on a landscape decide to protect it, the chances of that protection actually holding go up considerably.

The deed was facilitated with support from the Tenkile Conservation Alliance, which has been working alongside these communities for over two decades. The agreement covers a significant stretch of forest (1,250 km² / 483 mi²) and is designed to safeguard not just wildlife, but the livelihoods and cultural identity of the clans themselves.

It recognizes that conservation works best when it benefits the people closest to the land.

For the Tenkile tree kangaroo and the dozens of other rare species that call these mountains home, this deed is fantastic good news!

It's easy to forget that global hunger actually got worse after 2020. The pandemic disrupted food supply chains, pushed millions into poverty, and reversed decades of hard-won progress in food security almost overnight.

For a few years, the trend was heading in entirely the wrong direction. By some estimates, the number of undernourished people worldwide jumped by tens of millions between 2019 and 2022.

That makes this update all the more meaningful!

According to newly released data, the global prevalence of malnourishment has fallen to 7.8% in 2025, down from 8.1% in 2024. That's the lowest rate since the pandemic hit, though not quite back to the pre-pandemic level yet. Still, in raw numbers that's about 645 million people, down 43 million from 2022.

South Asia alone cut its hunger rate from 13.9% to 9.3% in just four years, and Southeast Asia is down to 5.1%. A lot of that progress comes from India, plus broader gains in agricultural production and food distribution across the region.

It would be wrong to call this problem solved though. Hunger remains heavily concentrated in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and in conflict-affected regions where food insecurity can worsen rapidly. The 7.8% figure is a global average that masks significant variation, and averages can be misleading. But the direction of the trend is the point!

I hadn't really thought about breastfeeding as a global health issue before I came across this. Turns out it's one of the bigger levers we have, and most people probably also have no idea.

Breastfeeding tends to feel like a personal choice rather than a public health priority. But the data tells a different story! According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, optimal breastfeeding practices could prevent an estimated 400,000 child deaths and around 140,000 maternal deaths every year.

The good news: rates are moving.

Exclusive breastfeeding in a baby's first six months went from 37% in 2012 to over 47% today.

Breastfeeding up to age two rose from 38% to 50% in just the last five years.

Millions of mothers are making a different choice than a decade ago. This shift reflects growing awareness, better maternity policies in some countries, and expanded access to breastfeeding counseling and support.

But both agencies are clear that progress is uneven and that health systems in many parts of the world still fail to give mothers the support they need. Hospital support, community counseling, paid maternity leave, and rules against aggressive formula marketing all help, but none of them reach everyone yet, especially in poorer and crisis-hit regions.

The call from WHO and UNICEF is for governments to invest more seriously in these areas.

The fact that rates are moving in the right direction is genuinely good news. And the roadmap for going further is well understood. It mostly takes political will and investment to follow it!

Okay here is an extra story this week!

The kākāpō is, by almost any measure, a remarkable bird. It is the world's heaviest parrot, it cannot fly, it is almost entirely nocturnal, and it only breeds when certain trees produce a bumper crop of fruit (which happens irregularly and unpredictably).

These traits made it spectacularly ill-equipped to survive the arrival of predators like rats, stoats, and cats in New Zealand.

By the 1990s, the species had been reduced to just 51 individuals. It was, by any honest assessment, nearly gone.

What followed was one of conservation's more intensive rescue operations. New Zealand wildlife managers moved every surviving kākāpō to predator-free offshore islands, set up individual monitoring for each bird, and began a careful program of supplementary feeding and nest management. 

It has been slow, painstaking work.

But this year, that work delivered a record result!

The 2026 breeding season produced around 90 chicks, pushing the total kākāpō population to approximately 325. That is not a large number in absolute terms, but for a species that was functionally approaching extinction within living memory, it represents a genuine turnaround.

Each breeding season is still uncertain (kākāpō are long-lived but slow to reproduce) but the trajectory is now clearly pointing upward!

We read your feedback that you sent for this newsletter (thank you!) and some of you also asked us to include the sources. So here they are:

I'll be back with more (probably) next week! Until then, take care of yourselves — Freddy 🌻

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