Nations

This archive collects milestones and progress stories involving nations — countries and their governments — acting to improve lives, protect rights, or address shared challenges. From policy breakthroughs to international cooperation, these stories show what countries are doing right.

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Thailand bans imports of plastic waste to curb toxic pollution

By / / Good News For Humankind

Thailand’s plastic waste ban took effect in January 2025, closing the door on a trade that brought more than 1.1 million tonnes of foreign plastic scrap into the country between 2018 and 2021. Much of that waste was never recycled — factories often burned it instead, sending toxic fumes into nearby communities and contributing to risks of stroke, heart attack, and dementia. The ban is the hard-won result of years of organizing by Thai activists who documented the harm and refused to let it continue. With global treaty talks still stalled by oil-producing nations, Thailand’s move offers a hopeful blueprint: when communities push and governments listen, the tide on plastic pollution can begin to turn.

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Indonesia launches free meals program to feed millions of children and pregnant women

By / / Good News For Humankind

Indonesia’s free meal program kicked off in January 2025 by serving rice, vegetables, tempeh, chicken, and oranges to 740 students at a single primary school outside Jakarta — the opening day of an effort that aims to feed nearly 90 million people by 2029. The program targets a stunting crisis affecting more than one in five Indonesian children under five, extending meals to pregnant women because healthy development begins in the womb. Nearly 2,000 local cooperatives will supply the food, channeling income to rice growers, fisherfolk, and livestock producers along the way. It’s a generational bet that nourishing kids today builds the human foundation any country needs to thrive tomorrow.

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China has reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by more than two-thirds in the last 15 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

China’s sulphur dioxide emissions fell by 70 percent between 2006 and 2017, even as the country’s economy roughly tripled in size over the same stretch. That kind of decoupling — slashing a major industrial pollutant while growing fast — is something climate scientists have long argued was possible but rarely seen at this scale. The shift came from real policy muscle: stricter enforcement, legal accountability for local officials, and a massive pivot to clean energy, with China funding nearly half of global renewable investment in 2017 alone. Coal still looms large and the work is far from done, but this milestone is tangible proof that entrenched pollution problems can move, and quickly, when commitment meets follow-through.

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Biden permanently bans offshore drilling in 625 million acres of ocean

By / / Good News For Humankind

Offshore drilling is now off the table across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters, thanks to a sweeping executive action from President Biden. The protections cover the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific shores of Washington, Oregon, and California, and parts of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. What makes this move different is its staying power: Biden invoked a 1953 law that legal experts say can’t easily be undone without Congress. Alongside the ocean announcement, two new national monuments in California — both championed by Native tribes — bring his total conserved lands to 10. It’s a quiet but powerful reminder that some places are simply too precious to drill, and that lasting protection is possible when law, science, and community all pull in the same direction.

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Zimbabwe abolishes the death penalty

By / / Good News For Humankind

Zimbabwe has abolished the death penalty, and around 60 people who were awaiting execution will now have their cases returned to judges for resentencing. President Emmerson Mnangagwa — himself once sentenced to death during the country’s independence struggle — signed the law immediately after parliament’s vote, ending a practice introduced under British colonial rule. Zimbabwe becomes the 114th country worldwide and the 25th in Africa to fully end capital punishment, joining a steady generational shift away from state executions. One caveat remains: the law still permits the death penalty during a declared state of emergency, which Amnesty International has urged lawmakers to remove. Even so, it’s a meaningful step in a region where the abolitionist movement keeps quietly gaining ground.

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Kazakhstan’s snow leopard population reaches near-historic levels

By / / Good News For Humankind

Snow leopards in Kazakhstan have rebounded to between 152 and 189 individuals — population levels not seen since the 1980s, and a 26% jump since 2019. Much of the credit goes to expanded protected areas like Ile-Alatau, Altyn-Emel, and Katon-Karagai, where a female with two cubs was recently spotted in territory once considered too marginal for the species. Rangers now use camera traps, drones, and thermal imaging across 14 natural areas, while a compensation program helps herders coexist with the cats instead of retaliating. Cross-border cooperation with Kyrgyzstan extends that protection beyond political lines. For one of the world’s most elusive big cats, it’s a quiet but powerful reminder that patient, coordinated conservation can actually turn the tide.

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Asiatic wild asses return to Saudi Arabia after 100 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Onagers are roaming Saudi Arabia again for the first time in roughly a century, and one of the seven relocated from Jordan has already given birth to a foal. The Persian onager was chosen as the closest living relative to the Syrian wild ass, a subspecies hunted to extinction in the 1920s, making this a careful act of ecosystem repair rather than simple reintroduction. Researchers matched the new home to Jordan’s reserve by vegetation overlap, easing the animals’ transition, with plans to grow the herd and eventually release them across nearly 7,800 square miles. With fewer than 600 Persian onagers left in the wild, every new foothold strengthens a fragile species — and shows what patient, cross-border conservation can quietly accomplish.

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Finland becomes world’s first country to ban cargo ships from dumping wastewater

By / / Good News For Humankind

Finland just became the first country in the world to ban cargo ships from dumping wastewater in its coastal waters, extending a rule that previously only applied to passenger ferries. The Baltic Sea desperately needs the help: it’s shallow, slow to refresh, and roughly 2,000 ships cross it every day, each carrying enough crew to rival a small town’s worth of sewage. Years of patient work by the Baltic Sea Action Group helped move shipping companies from voluntary pledges to binding law, and port wastewater collection has already tripled over the past five years. Finland’s jurisdiction ends at its territorial waters, but the law offers a tested blueprint other Baltic nations can follow — and a reminder that national legislation can outpace slow-moving global rules when ecosystems can’t wait.

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Renewable power set to overtake fossil fuels in the U.K. this year for the first time

By / / Good News For Humankind

U.K. renewables made history in 2024, generating 37 percent of the country’s electricity and edging out fossil fuels for the first full calendar year on record. The shift has been remarkably fast — as recently as 2021, fossil fuels still produced nearly half of Britain’s power. Wind led the charge, with onshore generation jumping 23 percent in the first nine months of the year after England lifted its longstanding planning ban. The same year, Britain shut down its very last coal plant, closing a chapter that began in 1882. For a grid that powers homes, transport, and industry, this turning point lays the foundation every other climate goal depends on.

Namibian President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, for article on Namibia first female president, for article on female president

Namibia elects Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah as its first female president

By / / Good News For Humankind

Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has become Namibia’s first female president, winning 57% of the vote in November 2024 — enough to clinch the race in a single round. At 72, she brings a half-century of public life to the role, from her work in the underground liberation movement of the 1970s to her years as foreign minister and, most recently, vice-president. Known as a steady, diplomatic presence largely untouched by the scandals that have shadowed others in her party, she now leads the country she once helped free. Her rise stands out across a region where women heads of state remain rare, and where several liberation-era ruling parties are losing ground — a quiet but meaningful milestone for African democracy.