Your World Tonight - Running ships on electricity, a casket made from mushrooms, a Lake Ontario shipwreck older than Canada, and more

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

Looking back at some of our favourite stories from 2025:Many of our stories look at environmental challenges and solutions, from reducing the carbon footprint of ships in port, to reducing your own carbon footprint after death. And merchants finding ways to reduce food waste in Nigeria's markets, while others boost local sustainable wool production in Europe.Also: tackling threats to wildlife. Scientists in B.C. have a new tool to fight a disease which has been devastating bat colonies throughout North America. Meanwhile other animals face a different kid of threat: trains. We look at ways to prevent wildlife from being hit.Plus: Divers in Lake Ontario went searching for one shipwreck, but found another one much older. The intact wreck is believed to predate Conferderation and could shed light on a little understood part of the region's history.

When Christy Lee started her podcast, she wanted to avoid the spotlight. But that's kind of become impossible. Canadian True Crime has over 70 million downloads and is constantly at the top of the charts. This week on Crime Story, behind the scenes with Canadian True Crime and Christy Lee. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. The CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Stephanie Skanderas, and this is a special edition of Your World Tonight. We're looking back at some of our favorite stories of 2025.

Most of them involving challenges to the natural world and how people are rallying to meet them. From disease facing bats in Canadian caves and the probiotic that can help them, to the cold room transfer. taking place in Nigeria's open-air markets. You'll hear about the efforts to stop wildlife from being hit by trains and a more environmentally friendly method for humans to return to the earth. We begin with a way of stopping a big polluter that's pulling into our harbors. Whether they are carrying people or goods,

Ships are a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions and other kinds of pollution, even when docked. But there is a way to help cut those emissions when ships are at port, plugging them in. Emily Chung explains. Hundreds of cruise ships come and go from Canadian ports each year. New arrivals spill their contents into the city. You see waves of tourists. walking around with big smiles. You also see every once in a while

a cloud of blue smoke wafting wafting over the first couple blocks of downtown. That's Brent Dancy from Oceans North. He's in Halifax often for his work with the Marine Conservation Group. He himself has choked on that pollution and says locals complain too.

They call the port about it, but it's really a human health issue. The problem is that ships burn fuel even while in port to power what's essentially a floating city. But they don't have to. With the right equipment and infrastructure, they could plug in at the dock and use electricity instead. That's called shore power. A research brief from Oceans North shows it's widely available in ports like Hamburg, Shanghai, and Long Beach. Basically full coverage for cruise

and container shipping. But only four of Canada's 17 port authorities have any shore power despite the many benefits. What we've noticed, plugging in a vessel reduces the emissions for that vessel while it's plugged in by about 68%. Kurt Slocum is in charge of planning an infrastructure at the port of Prince Rupert in B.C. It installed shore power at two of its five berths for container ships in 2023. Slocum says the reduced noise from ships plugging in has already had unexpected benefits. We've already seen whales in larger numbers than normal. So far, Prince Rupert's shore power has only been used by 15 vessels.

Part of that is which vessels are calling that can plug in and which ones can't. But Dancy says it's also because, unlike other countries, Canada doesn't make ships plug in. So far, Canadian governments have spent more than 40 million installing shore power, the Ocean's North Report found. But if ships don't have to plug in... We're not really maximizing the benefits of that investment. The Port of Montreal's expansion is one of the projects recently fast-tracked by the federal government. We're building it for the next generation.

Spokesperson Julianne Baudry says it will serve many ships from Europe and every ship that arrives at the new terminal will be able to access shore power. And the consumers in Europe, they want green product. So having a green ship at the port of Montreal, a ship that's electrify when at shore, that's something that will benefit not only the people that lives nearby, but also the companies will be using that terminal to export goods in Europe.

Brent Danty says with global regulations coming in to cut pollution and emissions from shipping, Canadian ports are going to need more shore power to stay competitive. Emily Chung, CBC News, Toronto. In Nigeria's capital, a quiet transformation is taking place in some of its open-air markets. solar-powered cold rooms are cutting food waste, boosting earnings for women vendors, and keeping prices steady for shoppers. As Kunle Babs reports, it's a simple idea that's reshaping local food trade and driving climate resilience. Before, I threw away lots of tomatoes and peppers every week. Now, with the cold room, I store them at an affordable price overnight and they stay fresh.

For years, traders like Minna miner watched part of their goods rot in the heat before they could sell them. But with solar-powered coal storage inside the market, things are changing. Mina are now rent space to keep our unsold goods overnight and what used to be wasted is now sold the next day. My income is better now.

I can save more. Even late in the evening, the tomatoes still look new. With frequent power cuts and high diesel cost, Keeping food fresh without electricity has always been a major challenge. The solar runs everything. We work 24 hours. Our uptime is more than 95%. Nasseri Rebellio runs a solar-powered cold room at Garikyu International Market in Abuja.

He says the system is not only reliable, but also making a real difference for women vendors. Vendors pay about 68 cents to store a crate for a day. Most of our customers are women, and when they earn more, it supports their families. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Nigeria loses up to 50% of highly perishable crops after harvest yearly. But Code Ops, a leading cold storage provider says vendors using solar-powered cold rooms have caught those losses by as much as 80% and boasted their incomes by 25%. The company currently serves more than 11,100 farmers, retailers and old sellers across the country. country through 58 solar cold rooms.

The cold storage helps us a lot, so when we cool the perishables before blinking them to the market, they arrive fresh. For small-scale farmers like Sadia Yahaya, pre-cooling their produce before transport helps protect its quality and reduce waste, and with less spoilage on the road, they earn more from every harvest. We lose less and buyers pay better. However, climate expert Pana Samuel says the impact remains. limited because access to these solar cold rooms is still unheavened across the country.

The cold room facilities are not enough. For a country as big as Nigeria, every major market should have one. Right now, that's not the case. Experts say wider government support and investment could help expand solar-powered cold rooms to more markets nationwide, ensuring more farmers and traders benefit and helping Nigeria drastically cost post-average losses. Kunlebabs for CBC News, Abuja, Nigeria. Julia.

Wool is one of the world's oldest textiles. It's naturally occurring, biodegradable, and keeps you warm in those cold winter months. But these days, most wool is mass produced, leaving small-scale farmers and mills struggling to survive. As Megan Williams reports from Rome, a new movement led by designers, producers, activists, and farmers is trying to bring wool back sustainably. On a blustery fall day outside Rome, sheep graze and the pastors of Ina Vinturini Fendi's farm. Once a fashion designer at her family's luxury label, Fendi left that world behind to focus on circular design and sustainable wool. Today, her farm is a meeting place for the World Hope Forum, with farmers, activists and designers determined to prove that wool produced locally can once again have worth. Among them is Canadian designer Cynthia Hathaway.

Wool is a biodegradable resource that used to be the golden fleece, but has been kicked out, I guess you could say. Hathaway started thinking about wool when doing a design stint on a farm. And there were sheep in the landscape, and so I followed the wool trail and found out that wool is part of a global system now. One that obscures the fact that most wool is now industrially produced and environmentally damaging. Today, wool makes up less than 1% of the world's textile.

fibers, with cheaper petroleum-based synthetics now dominating the global market. Hathaway organizes regular wool marches in her adopted country of the Netherlands, leading flocks of sheep through city streets, soft mobs, she calls them, to highlight how devalued locally produced wool is in much of the world. In Europe, cost to produce it is so high, many sheep farmers simply burn it. The wool march also points to how far fashion has drifted from the land. Take Irish wool, for example, most of which actually comes from China and is passed off as local.

Blonaid Galaher, founder of Ireland's Galway Wool Co-op, is trying to change that. She'll soon join an EU-focused group looking at how to rebuild the continent's wool economy. We want to ensure that the policy also includes consumers given the opportunity to know where that fiber grew. Italian actor and now farmer, Isabella Rossellini is also working to reconnect people to the fiber's origins.

We started with a vegetable and then it became chickens and now the heritage breed of sheep for wool. At her mama farm in New York, she and her daughter, Elektra Weidman, run a program called Farm to Fashion, pairing young designers with heritage wool. That really explains to people where this sweater comes from, who created it, the artist is involved, when you buy it, what you're supporting. Weinman says people are more invested in what they buy when they know it's supporting local economies and biodiversity. It's a very ancient fiber. Dutch future forecaster Lee Edelcourt,

the organizer of the World Hope Forum, says Wool has become a way to tell new stories about how fashion can be made. Here you see the local communities making outsider art, you know, insanely beautiful. It's so rich. As sheep graze in the distance, these artists and farmers are trying to be. to reshape how we value the materials and the lives of those behind what we wear.

Megan Williams, CBC News, Rome. Still ahead, it started as a shadow. No one could identify 100 meters below Lake Ontario. From there, the mystery only grew. A potential ship from a time period shrouded in uncertainty. You'll hear why it has experts so excited that's coming up on your world tonight. Bats living in caves across eastern Canada are under threat. White-nose syndrome has already devastated those bat populations. Now as the fungal disease starts spreading west to British Columbia, one scientist is fighting back with a unique tool, a probiotic cocktail.

The remedy, which is already gaining traction across the border, could be the key to giving BC's bats a chance at survival. Camille Verne explains. Now we're going to hear the bat. In a shed near Mission, BC, scientist Corey Lawson likely shakes a bag with a bat inside. That sound is the bat detector, which allows humans to hear the sound of echolocation,

and it helps identify the bat. That is definitely a humamiodis. This particular species is only found in the West, so we don't know yet how badly they're going to be hit by White Nose Syndrome, but we do suspect they're going to be devastated. White Nose syndrome is a fungal disease that has devastated eastern bat populations. It affects their skin, wings and nose while they hibernate and ultimately kills them. Lawson is part of a team.

from the Wildlife Conservation Society, looking for a remedy. We just call it a cocktail. This cocktail is a mixture of probiotic bacteria that comes naturally from bats. The scientists spray it into their habitat and the bats spread it around as they groom themselves. It's a race against time because the fungal disease is not yet in BC,

but it's present in Alberta and Washington State. So it's not a matter of whether it will get here. It is a matter of when, and it might already be here. Since 2022, the U.S. has been testing the Canadian cocktail. Abigail Tobin is a scientist for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. She and her team of volunteers are near Darrington to capture bats. And it's a tricky task. They're on to us, so we'll see.

Finally, a few bats are caught. Tobin looks at a bat with white spots at the end of its. swings. Over here looks more suspicious of white nose damage right there. Through the swaths we collect from bats wings, the lab that processing those is finding that there are higher levels of probiotic and lower levels of the fungus on bats that are being treated. It's showing that the probiotic is staying and hopefully suppressing the growth of that fungus. Once all the data is collected, they release the bat. There she goes. Preliminary results are promising a according to Corey Lawson.

So far, it does look like the probiotic bacteria that we're using is keeping the fungus that causes the disease. It's keeping it at bay. In the fall, some bats species are heading into the forest. Despite tagging, it's still not clear where they hibernate in BC. But Lawson hopes that if the disease is here, her cocktail will give the bats the protection they need to return in spring. Camille Verne, CBC News, Mission BC.

Bigger animals in BC, like grizzlies and moose, are facing another kind of threat. Trains. Thousands of kilometers of railway crisscross the province, and much of it passes through remote wilderness. Hundreds of animals have been struck and sometimes killed by trains in BC in recent years. An investigation by CBC News and the narwhal is shutting light on the collisions. CBC's Jackie McKay looks at the efforts to bring the number of collisions down. There's a problem out there. There's a problem on our railways. And people have to know this is happening. Retired locomotive engineer Jim Atkinson has been trying to raise the alarm for

years. The former CN employee did everything he could to not hit animals. But sometimes it was unavoidable. It's not a very good feeling to run over an animal with a train. The exact number of animals hit by trains each year is hard to know. Journalists at the Narwhal filed a freedom of information request to the BC government and shared the responses with CBC News. Data shows CN Railway reported 340 collision incidents with wildlife such as elk, deer, and bears from 2020 to 2023. Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway Company's data shows 182 animals in the Kootenies were hit on

its rails between 2022 and 2023. It just feels like an unacceptable number. Wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb stands under a rail bridge where he found a grizzly bear and three cubs killed by a passing train. Lamb has been tracking animals using wildlife callers in the Elk Valley of southeastern BC for more than a decade. There's costs of having people on the landscape and doing things to wildlife, but I think it feels better when everybody's trying to make it better for wildlife.

There are things that can help. Biologist Colleen Sinclair has studied the problem around Banff. She says the best thing trains could do is slow down. Places where they know that collisions are more likely, probably to reduce train speed. St. Clair also worked on a warning device that flashes lights and beeps to let animals know a train is coming. It found that large animals left the tracks six seconds earlier. But they aren't being used. The railway companies did not answer a number of our questions, but in a statement, CPKC says it prioritizes practical mitigation strategies. CNN says the company is actively evaluating a range of detection devices. Jackie McKay, CBC News, Elk Valley, BC.

It's not something a lot of people are comfortable thinking about. But where you end up, after you die, can also be an environmental choice. A new burial option available in Canada promises to be much less carbon-intensive than conventional caskets or cremation. It's a kind of coffin made partly of mushroom roots. Anand Rahm has more. In the solemnity of a Brampton Ontario funeral center, there's a room where people come to see the kinds of caskets that are, for lack of a better word, on offer.

But there's something new in there. Tell me about what we're seeing. Yes, it's more in the shape of somewhat of a cocoon. Angie Aquino has been in the funeral business for more than 40 years, and what she's showing us is a casket. Its name, like its shape, is the loop-living cocoon. It is made of mycelium, which is the root structure of mushroom, and it's a blend of that along with the upcycled hemp fibers.

Spungy, styrofoam-like this coffin biodegrades in the soil in a matter of months, giving its unadorned, unembalmed occupant, a less carbon-intensive way to return to the earth. For some, it's about giving back to the environment. For some, it's about enriching the soil. For some, it's about nature. The more overall mission is to enrich nature. Bob Hendricks of Loop Biotech in the Netherlands invented this coffin. And he is very much a product guy,

thinking about how to disrupt a traditional funeral industry that hasn't changed much. The whole intention of the product was to make sure the industry, for the industry, it should not be a different product, only for the environment. The mushrooms, he says, bodies decompose while enriching soil biodiversity. It's early days in North America, but he says they've sold a couple thousand cocoons in Europe. The number of people becoming interested in diverse options of funerals, that's just god ballistic. Douglas Davis is with the University of Durham

in the UK and has been studying death for decades. He says this environmental enthusiasm needs to be met by the establishment. I think that religious organizations need to think much harder about these aspects of life. And indeed, what kind of liturgies are appropriate. There wasn't any option for our bodies that aligned with my desire to, like, leave the planet a better place when I finally leave the planet. Katrina Spade is the CEO of a company that offers another alternative, technology to turn the deceased into soil through composting, a service that's now legal in 14 U.S. states. I think when people are choosing this option,

it's because it feels personally meaningful to them. That is a pretty profound idea that those molecules will truly and literally become part of that tree, that forest. Back in Brampton, Aquino takes us to where those mushroom coffins could go the wild and overgrown natural burial area. It is not maintained where we don't mow the lawn here.

It's not pristine. the same way that the rest of the cemetery is. And it's here, among the seven-foot-tall golden rods and buzzing insects, that you can listen to life growing out of death. On the Rheam, CBC News, Brampton, Ontario. You are listening to Your World Tonight from CBC News. I'm Stephanie Scandaris. You can hear your world tonight and other CBC radio programs wherever you are on your favorite

podcast app. When Canadian divers went searching for a century old shipwreck under the surface of Lake Ontario, they found something much older and rarer, a pristine vest. that likely predates Canadian Confederation. As Colin Butler reports, the relic could open a window on a poorly understood period of shipbuilding history. And when we saw that, we were like overjoyed. Heisenchak remembers the moment well.

The veteran diver was 100 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario when the lights cut through the gloom and uncovered a ghost from a long forgotten era. It took us a few moments to calm ourselves down because it's overwhelming, finding a pristine wreck that is, only one piece. A rarity in the Great Lakes, where most wrecks collapse under Quagga muscles are crushed by storms, anchors, or human interference. Remarkably, this one has survived near Toronto's watery doorstep. There's a lot of shipping that goes back and forth,

but it somehow managed to escape any damage. Trent University archaeology professor James Connolly says the wreck was first spotted in 2017 during a fiber optic cable survey between Buffalo and Toronto. Large and unusual it appeared as a shadow no one could identify. Connolly hoped it might be a pristine ship, possibly the Rapid City, a century-old schooner long lost to Lake Ontario. This is different than what we thought it was. This is something else. This is something far stranger and maybe far older on it. Rope rigging, a rounded bow, an early windless design. Both masks still upright, topmasts intact. The dive team thinks it could date back to the first half of the 19th century, a period of Great Lakes shipbuilding that's poorly understood. Well, it's not that we

know so little about it, but we have so rare examples. Charles Beaker is a professor at Indiana University. He's been researching and preserving Great Lakes shipwrecks for over 40 years. If this truly turns out diagnostically for the artifact, to give it a terminus post quim of pre-U.S. Civil War, that's rare. Pre-1850 Great Lakes ships rarely survived. Most sank in storms, rotted away, or were scrapped. Few records remain. I'm most excited if it turns out this is older. I don't want to diminish value because it's a great example. The dive team will return to the wreck next season. Wood samples will allow them to pinpoint the year it grew.

For now, the ship waits beneath the waves near Toronto, silent, intact, guarding secrets. We're only beginning to understand. Colin Butler, CBC News, London, Ontario. And that's it for this special edition of Your World Tonight. I'm Stephanie Skanderas. Thank you for listening. Good night. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com slash podcasts.