Author: Fabiana Fondevila

We are all too familiar with the bad news; we read about them everyday on the front pages of newspapers. To turn our backs on this news would be foolish and irresponsible. But if only expose ourselves to that aspect of reality, we can easily fall into discouragement and dispair. The truth is that, far from the headlines and in every corner of the world, bright and important things are taking place

In this article we’ll share eight news items, from a list of 86 carefully prepared by the amazing team at Fix the News, which highlights progress and improvement on different key fronts

This is not to underestimate the size of the challenges, but to give us the strength to fight back by focusing on the thousands of people and initiatives that are making a difference, and helping to bring about a loving and sustainable world for all. Says Kristine Tompkins, who, along with her late husband Doug, managed to protect nearly 6 million hectares of land in Argentina and Chile and reintroduce more than two dozen keystone species:

“There is a collapse taking place, and it would be happening with rapid velocity if it weren’t for the millions of people around the world who are working to slow down these trends; and they’re doing so in the force of great headwinds.“

Let’s take a look at some of these headwinds!

We fed around a quarter of the world’s kids at school

Around 480 million students are now getting fed at school, up from 319 million before the pandemic, and 104 countries have joined a global coalition to promote school meals, School feeding policies are now in place in 48 countries in Africa, and this year Nigeria announced plans to expand school meals to 20 million children by 2025, Kenya committed to expanding its program from two million to ten million children by the end of the decade, and Indonesia pledged to provide lunches to all 78 million of its students, in what will be the world’s largest free school meals program.

Millions more children got an education

Staggering statistics incoming: between 2000 and 2023, the number of children and adolescents not attending school fell by nearly 40%, and Eastern and Southern Africa, achieved gender parity in primary education, with 25 million more girls are enrolled in primary school today than in the early 2000s. Since 2015, an additional 110 million children have entered school worldwide, and 40 million more young people are completing secondary school.

And much better news on access to water, sanitation and hygiene

In what might be this year’s most invisible story of progress, a WHO-UNICEF report revealed that between 2015 and 2023, over 200 million children gained access to improved water, sanitation, or hygiene services at school. That’s not a typo. Also this year, Malaysia closed in on universal access to clean water and sanitation, Mexico announced a €5 billion investment in clean water, Nepal reported a three-fold decline in diarrhoea rates for children, a new project in Brazil gave over a million rural residents access to water and sanitation, Senegal kicked off a project to provide water and sanitation to seven million people, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo one-upped that with a project to provide access to 12 million people.

Deforestation in the Amazon halved in two years

Brazil’s space agency, INPE, confirmed a second consecutive year of declining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. That means deforestation rates have roughly halved under Lula, and are now approaching all time lows. In Colombia, deforestation dropped by 36%, hitting a 23-year low. Bolivia created four new protected areas, a huge new new state park was created in Pará to protect some of the oldest and tallest tree species in the tropical Americas and a new study revealed that more of the Amazon is protected than we originally thought, with 62.4% of the rainforest now under some form of conservation management.

Did we save the whales?

Thanks to its groundbreaking moratorium on commercial whaling in 1985, it looks like the International Whaling Commission may have put itself out of a job. There was an upswing in humpback populations in Icelandic waters and in the South Atlantic Ocean their numbers recovered to pre-whaling levels. Scientists confirmed the comeback of fin whales in the Scotia Sea; blue whales were spotted in the Seychelles for the first time in decades; and the numbers of Antarctic blue whales also increased.

Cities got greener and cleaner

Paris continued to be at the forefront of global urban renewal efforts, implementing a ban on motorists driving through central areas of the city, announcing plans to swap 60,000 parking spaces for trees, and reporting a 40% decline in air pollution in the last decade. Kigali, Rwanda, became Africa’s cleanest city thanks to community efforts and government policies, a mass cleaning drive in the Chennai, India removed 250 tonnes of waste from parks in a single day, In Italy, Turin continued its evolution from ‘motor city’ to a cycling haven, Medellin, Colombia cut temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees, Berlin became a sponge city and New York opened around 60km of ‘greenways.’

Doctors gave people the gift of speech, sound and sight

Tell us this isn’t like magic. An ALS patient received treatment that allowed him to speak to his daughter again, using sound decoders in his brain and AI software, part of a new wave of brain-machine interfaces that could transform life for paralysed people. Three people with profoundly impaired vision saw major improvement in their eyesight following the transplants of reprogrammed stem cells, and an 11-year-old Moroccan boy received gene therapy for congenital deafness, and started to hear again. “There’s no sound I don’t like.” 

Roads became safer for animals… and humans

Wildlife crossings are incredibly effective and this year they multiplied across the United States: Washington State added 16 to its network, Colorado recorded a 90% reduction in wildlife-involved crashes thanks to its 40 underpasses and three overpasses, and construction began on the world’s largest wildlife bridge in California that will reconnect the Santa Monica Mountains with the Simi Hills, giving threatened mountain lions, bobcats and mule deer safe passage over a 10-lane freeway, and vastly extending wildlife habitat.

The rest of this awe-inspiring list of news items covers energy, health, human rights, education and other crucial fronts.

“Hope is often misunderstood,” said ethologist and activist Jane Goodall. “People tend to think of it as simply passive wishful thinking: ‘I hope something will happen, but I’m not going to do anything about it.’ This is the opposite of true hope, which requires action and commitment.”

May these truly hopeful actions and achievements from so many parts of the world inspire us to join forces in the direction of collective progress!

Images: Flamingos in Andalusia, Mara Brandl/Getty; bicycles in Paris: Nicolas Messyasz / AP; children at school: Claudio Kbene / WFP.