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.
The Southeast Asian country will become the third Asian nation, after Taiwan and Nepal, to legalize same-sex marriage. A new amendment to its Civil and Commercial Code will change the words “men and women” and “husband and wife” to “individuals” and “marriage partners.” The next step will be an amendment to the country’s pension fund law to recognize same-sex couples.
The European Commission has agreed that Germany should be allowed to pay the energy giant RWE some €2.6 billion in state aid for the early closure of coal power stations. Under German law, no more electricity is to be produced from coal from 2038 onward. However, this new agreement moves the date forward to 2030.
Drug patent seizures are back on the table for the first time in over 40 years, with the Biden administration releasing a draft roadmap that explicitly lets the federal government license out medicines to competitors when companies charge prices most Americans can’t afford. The power has existed since 1980 but was never used or even defined — until now. Price itself is now a factor: if a drug was built on taxpayer-funded research through agencies like the NIH, and the company sells it out of reach of ordinary patients, generics could be authorized. Even as a credible threat, this reframes who publicly funded science is really for — and could shift drug pricing fights well beyond U.S. borders.
The Biden administration has now cancelled an unprecedented $130 billion in student debt for more than 3.6 million Americans, offering much-needed relief to low-income families across the country.
Conventional cooling, such as air conditioning, is a major driver of climate change, responsible for over seven per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If not managed properly, energy needs for space cooling will triple by 2050, together with associated emissions.
Amazon restoration just got a $204 million boost from Brazil, aimed at bringing degraded rainforest back to life through replanting and natural regrowth. The program flows through the Amazon Fund, with renewed backing from Norway and Germany after years of paused support. Much of the work will lean on Indigenous and traditional communities, whose territories consistently show lower deforestation than surrounding lands. It builds on real momentum: deforestation in the first half of 2023 fell by half compared to the year before. No single check rewrites decades of loss, but a forest that shelters roughly 10% of all known species — and helps regulate rainfall across a continent — is finally being treated as something worth actively healing.
At the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway in formally joining the alliance, which was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and phasing out existing unabated coal plants.
In a powerful victory for climate campaigners, the Brussels court of appeal ordered Belgium to cut its planet-heating pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. By 2021, Belgium had cut its emissions by just 24%. The court rejected arguments that Belgium’s impact on the climate crisis was limited by its small size.
Rights of Nature law just did something it had never quite done before at this scale: Panama’s Supreme Court unanimously used it to shut down one of the hemisphere’s largest copper mines, finding the concession failed to meet nature’s legal right to protection and regeneration. The ruling sets real precedent — any future project in Panama that can’t clear that same constitutional standard faces the same risk. The Canadian operator is pursuing international arbitration, so the dispute is far from over. Case by case, courtrooms across the Americas are turning ecological rights from policy aspirations into enforceable law.
According to HSI, the African elephant population has declined by 96% over the last century, and poachers in Africa kill as many as 25,000 elephants and 1,300 rhinos every year. Poaching is the most significant threat to these species, experts say.
