This archive collects milestones and solutions-focused stories where humanity as a collective is the actor — moments when people across nations, cultures, and communities have made measurable progress on shared challenges. From public health to environmental repair, these stories highlight what human cooperation and ingenuity can accomplish.
Due to a highly effective global vaccine program, the proportion of children under five who are chronically infected with Hepatitis B has plummeted significantly—to just under 1%. This is down from around 5% in the pre-vaccine era (the period between the 1980s and the early 2000s), according to new estimates from the World Health Organization.
In the World Health Organization’s annual global tuberculosis report, the UN agency responsible for international public health forecasts hundreds of thousands of people recovering from, or avoiding the disease of TB altogether. Since 2000, TB treatment has averted the deaths of 60 million people, the disease itself being treatable with the right medicine.
Global installed offshore wind capacity reached 27,064 MW in 2019 — a 19% increase from the previous year. Industry analyst projections indicate that offshore wind costs will continue to decline globally over the next decade.
The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020.
In 2019, nearly three-quarters of all new energy sources were renewable, the most ever since data collection began in 2001, according to a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
Wind power had a banner year in 2019, with the world adding 60.4 gigawatts of new capacity — a 19% jump over the year before. Offshore wind was the real breakthrough, making up a tenth of all new installations for the first time ever as turbines moved from niche projects into mainstream infrastructure. The U.S. and China together drove nearly two-thirds of the growth, while falling costs — wind is now more than 70% cheaper than a decade ago — keep pulling new countries into the market. Industry leaders are clear that even this record pace needs to roughly double to meet Paris climate goals, but the momentum is unmistakable: wind is becoming one of the cheapest, most scalable ways to power a livable future.
Up until about 2000 it had been moving southwards towards the Antarctic, affecting storm tracks and rainfall over South America, east Africa and Australia.
A global analysis from the University of Washington shows that nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance.
Between 1990 and 2015, the number of homicides per 100,000 people fell by 46%, with countries in Oceania experiencing a 22% drop over the same period, and 36% in Asia.
The rise in acceptance of LGBT people was particularly marked, rising from about one in four people expressing acceptance a decade ago to almost a third in the latest report.
