Eco wins: Hungary goes solar, marmots go viral and Rome gets an upgrade
From Hungary's accidental solar revolution to marmot crowdfunding and a long-overdue upgrade for Rome's big snake, good news comes in strange packages this week. Hungary's
From Hungary's accidental solar revolution to marmot crowdfunding and a long-overdue upgrade for Rome's big snake, good news comes in strange packages this week. Hungary's former leader Viktor Orban called European Union climate policy a "utopian fantasy" and effectively banned wind turbines. And yet the country has quietly become Europe's solar leader, with 25% of its electricity now being being generated from the renewable energy source, ahead of sunnier countries like Spain, and Greece. The boom was driven not by climate concern but by self-sufficiency politics and cheap subsidies. Now a 450-megawatt park, just east of Budapest, is due online by September 2026.
It's set to power around 106,000 households. Marmot researchers find a new way to fund their science When US federal funding dried up, researchers from UCLA and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory got creative. They launched OnlyMarms: a free platform posting videos of yellow-bellied marmots eating, digging and scampering in the wild, where fans can donate to support the science. The team has tracked individually marked marmots in Colorado since 1962, building six decades of data on family lives, social behavior and responses to environmental change — and say studying marmot hibernation could even hold clues about human aging.
Rome's 'big snake' gets a cooler future Corviale, a kilometer-long brutalist housing complex outside Rome nicknamed "the big snake," was completed in the 1980s and has since fallen into decay. With summers in some parts of Italy's now averaging around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), life inside has become tough for its more than 4,000 residents. But upgrades are coming: a new library doubling as a cooling shelter, more trees and energy efficiency improvements, all aimed at helping Corviale stay cool as temperatures keep rising. Senegalese designer turns discarded textiles into sustainable fashion Berlin-based designer Mame Khady Badji transforms discarded clothing into bold garments inspired by her Senegalese heritage, combining traditional Ndiakhass techniques with contemporary streetwear.
Her creations have drawn musicians, performers and creatives — and recently appeared at Berlin Fashion Week 2026. After moving to Germany in 2017, Badji built her label with support from Berlin's textile community. Now she's pursuing an ambitious goal: proving that recycled fashion can be both culturally rooted and commercially viable. Can sustainable fashion be profitable? To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Edited by: Jennifer Collins
The BriefWire