Living Planet

Our food choices affect the environment around us, but just how much? From Scandinavia to Somalia, we explore different diets around the world and take a closer look at how what we eat impacts the environment — and how the environment influences what we eat.

What happens when our water is contaminated, and who protects it? We meet the people cleaning our beaches, protecting our drinking water, and studying why there's not enough - or sometimes too much water.

Preventing mining pollution in Brazil, wind power finally taking off in Lebanon, and harvesting water from volcanic steam in Kenya. We take a look at development, progress and innovation by looking closer at the elements.

On this week's show, we join treetop activists in Germany's Hambach Forest as they fight to save the land from being mined for brown coal, we venture into the woods of Bavaria with volunteers helping to keep Germany's green lung healthy and we discover how residents in the UK have kept fracking at bay. Plus, we visit a group of students in Uganda who are using plants as natural pesticides.

People who grow our food face challenges around the world. We take a tour, from organic farms in Brexit Britain to cattle ranches in the KwaZulu Natal, via Senegal's nascent chemical-free farming movement and a mental-health crisis among farmers in rural France.

We are drowning in plastic! It pollutes our oceans, beaches, rivers and forests. Let's talk solutions. We meet "trash heroes" in Indonesia's Bali who are trying to do away with plastic. The East African country of Kenya was so fed up with its plastic waste, it imposed a ban on plastic bags one year ago. We check in to see how they are faring. And we have more on bioplastics.

Thanks to the invention of pesticides, fresh foods can be imported from every corner of the world, available everywhere at anytime. But this comes at a price: Overuse of pesticides in agriculture can seriously damage our environment — and our health.

Apes are humans' closest relatives, but these creatures are increasingly endangered. From Asia to Africa, human activity threatens their existence. But not all hope is lost.

Without water, there is no life. Water conservationist Rajendra Singh is bringing dead streams back to life in India. Thousands of dead fish have turned up in the Rhine River in Switzerland — fish are vulnerable to high temperatures as their environment heats up. And, an entrepreneur wants to drag icebergs all the way to South Africa!

It's hot out there. The heat wave sweeping across the northern hemisphere this week has farmers worried, especially where the high temperatures are combined with drought. We look at how farmers around the world are protecting their livestock and crops as the global temperature creeps ever higher.