What is Happy Orbis — and why are we building it?

Happy Orbis started with a very simple thought.

Most of us are not professional environmentalists.

We are parents, students, scientists, business owners, teachers, engineers, doctors, volunteers and people who simply want the place where we live to remain a good place to live.

We want clean water.

We want healthy rivers.

We want oceans that future generations can still depend on.

We want breathable air, functioning ecosystems and cities where people can live well.

But we also believe environmental protection has to work in the real world.

It has to work for families, communities, businesses and countries with very different circumstances.

Happy Orbis is therefore not built around anger.

It is built around understanding, evidence, cooperation and practical action.

One of the ideas behind Happy Orbis is that environmental problems are connected.

A stream becomes a river.

A river reaches a sea.

Seas become part of the global ocean.

Pollution does not care where one country ends and another begins.

Neither does air.

Neither does water.

That is why we want to connect people who would normally never meet: local volunteers and scientists, students and experienced professionals, communities and institutions.

Happy Orbis is currently being built by people in Europe.

But Happy Orbis is not a European project.

It belongs to anyone who shares its purpose.

Our ambition is eventually to have people participating from every country in the world.

Not because everybody must agree.

They will not.

The point is to create a place where people can talk, share evidence, compare what is happening in different parts of the world and find things we can actually solve together.

We are also building tools that can help communities observe what is happening around them and transform individual observations into information that researchers, organisations and public institutions can understand.

This community is the beginning.

So wherever you live, we would like to hear from you.

Start with one simple question:

What is happening to the environment where you live that the rest of the world should know about?