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.
Starting this week, same-sex couples can get married in Estonia, making it the first former Soviet nation to legalize marriage equality. Legislation for marriage equality passed the Baltic state’s parliament with a vote of 55 to 34 last June.
The UK’s electricity grid just hit a milestone unseen since 1957: gas and coal together produced less power than in any year of the last seven decades. Renewables — wind, solar, hydro, and biomass — supplied a record 42% of electricity in 2023, while coal alone has fallen 97% since 2008 and is set to disappear from the grid entirely when Britain’s last coal plant shuts in September 2024. Add nuclear, and more than half of the country’s electricity now comes from sources that emit no carbon. The deeper significance is simple: a major industrialized economy can run mostly on clean power not as a forecast, but as a lived, ordinary year — proof other countries can point to.
The new 2023 World Health Organization report on road safety shows that, since 2010, road traffic deaths have fallen by 5%—and that would translate into a 16% drop if the rise in global population was accounted for. 108 countries reported a drop in road traffic-related deaths between 2010 and 2021. Ten countries succeeded in reducing road traffic deaths by over 50%.
Violent crime across America fell at one of the fastest rates ever recorded in 2023, offering a meaningful reversal after the pandemic years pushed homicides to historic highs. The drop touched cities of nearly every size — from large metros like Los Angeles and Chicago to suburban and rural counties alike. Analysts were surprised by both the speed and the breadth of the turnaround. Progress like this shows that even deeply entrenched crime surges can reverse, giving communities and policymakers reason to believe that coordinated, sustained effort genuinely moves the needle.
The number of electric school buses operating or delivered in the U.S. rose from 598 in March 2022 to 1,285 in June 2023. The number of electric school buses that have been ordered or awarded funding nearly tripled in the same period. Forty-nine states had electric school bus commitments as of June 2023.
According to the East Asian nation’s Environment Ministry’s new biogas law, public and private industries that generate organic waste such as livestock manure and food waste will now be required to produce them in the form of biogas. Biogas is a gaseous renewable energy source produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, plant material and manure and can be used in vehicles that operate on natural gas.
Nuclear fusion just cleared a crucial bar: scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have now achieved ignition four separate times, with the best shot producing 89 percent more energy than the lasers delivered to the target. That repetition is what transforms a single 2022 breakthrough into real, replicable science — proof that the Sun-like reaction can be coaxed out of a frozen hydrogen pellet on Earth, again and again. Momentum is building beyond the lab, too, with more than $6 billion now invested in fusion worldwide and governments at COP28 agreeing to speed things along. The road from a boiled kettle’s worth of energy to a clean-powered grid is still long, but the hardest physics is finally behind us.
Uruguay now generates between 90% and 98% of its electricity from renewables, a shift it pulled off in roughly 15 years after starting out almost entirely dependent on imported oil. The turning point came in 2008, when an oil price spike pushed the government to take a chance on a nuclear physicist with an unconventional pitch: skip the nuclear plant, go all in on wind. About 50 wind farms later, paired with existing hydropower, the country had one of the cleanest grids on Earth — and around 50,000 new jobs in a nation of just 3.4 million. Uruguay’s quiet experiment offers something the global energy transition badly needs: proof that a small country, starting from scratch, can actually do this.
The sweeping pardon applies to all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents in possession of marijuana for their personal use and those convicted of similar federal crimes. It also forgives pot users in the District of Columbia.
Australia and Norway have formally joined the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP), a historic alliance aiming at ending international public subsidies for fossil fuels. The CETP was launched during COP26 in Glasgow and has grown to include 41 countries and organizations, signaling a significant step forward in combating the climate catastrophe.
