Malaria eradication could be certified worldwide by 2054, with the WHO confirming zero indigenous transmission across the 80 countries that once carried the disease. The projection builds on real momentum: mRNA vaccine breakthroughs, hundreds of thousands of community health workers, and a 2024 burden concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. If it holds, a millennia-old killer becomes something only grandparents remember.
Congo Basin forest payments are now reaching farming families directly, with a new Payments for Environmental Services program routing funds via mobile phone to communities who protect their surrounding forests. Administered through the Central African Forest Initiative with over 00 million committed, the program covers the DRC, Republic of Congo, and Gabon. What makes this significant is who receives the money: individual farmers, not governments or NGOs. By making standing forests financially competitive with logging or clearing land, the program rewrites conservation economics at the community level, offering a potential template for high-forest regions worldwide.
The Democratic Republic of Congo just passed legislation protecting 540,000 square kilometers of tropical forest — an area the size of France, and now the largest protected tropical forest reserve on Earth. At its heart is the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor, which aims to create 500,000 jobs by linking renewable energy hubs, sustainable farming, and the communities that depend on the forest. The model is already working at smaller scale inside Virunga National Park, where a similar partnership has generated over 21,000 jobs in five years — 11% of them held by people who left armed militias. It’s a rare plan that treats conservation, poverty, and peace as the same problem, offering a blueprint the world badly needs.
The first mpox diagnostic test has been cleared through the World Health Organization’s Emergency Use Listing, opening a faster procurement route for the countries hit hardest by the outbreak. Abbott’s Alinity m MPXV assay detects both clades of the virus from rash samples, and UN agencies can now order it directly for places where national approval pathways would otherwise take months. That speed matters: in 2024, only 37% of suspected mpox cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were confirmed by testing, leaving outbreaks harder to trace. Three more tests are already under WHO review, with more manufacturers in talks. It’s a hopeful signal that the world is learning from past pandemics — building diverse, quality-assured tools before bottlenecks become catastrophes.
Gavi has tapped its emergency First Response Fund for the very first time, committing up to $50 million to send 500,000 mpox vaccines to African countries hit hardest by the outbreak. The fund was built precisely for moments like this — letting the alliance move within days of a health emergency rather than waiting on slower funding cycles. The doses, from manufacturer Bavarian Nordic, will head to places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has carried the heaviest burden of the new Clade 1b strain. It’s a real start, even as experts estimate Africa needs around 10 million doses overall. If the tool keeps getting used and funded, it could reshape how quickly the world responds to outbreaks in lower-income regions.
Renewable energy now powers more than 99.7% of electricity in seven countries: Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each one leaned into what their landscape offered — Himalayan rivers, volcanic heat, massive shared dams — and built their grids around it. They’re the leading edge of a wider shift, with roughly 40 countries now sourcing at least half their electricity from renewables. Stanford’s Mark Jacobson puts it plainly: no miracle technologies are needed, just focused deployment of wind, water, and solar. These seven nations are quiet proof that a modern society running on clean power isn’t a distant goal — it’s already happening, and the rest of the world is catching up.
Malaria vaccines are heading to twelve African countries for the first time, with 18 million doses of RTS,S/AS01 set to roll out between 2023 and 2025. Nine nations are introducing the shot into routine childhood immunization, joining Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, where more than 1.7 million children have already been vaccinated since 2019. The pilot countries have seen severe malaria cases and child deaths decline, and families are showing up eager for their children to be protected. After a century of scientific struggle against one of humanity’s deadliest diseases, this rollout marks a turning point — proof that patient global collaboration can deliver lifesaving tools to the children who need them most.
The country’s Indigenous pygmy people are now legally recognized as a distinct people with rights and must consent before the government and industries can exploit their land.
The 500 million acres of forests may be the last significant land-based tropical carbon sink in the world, making the forests vitally important in the global fight against climate change.
Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iceland, Namibia, Nepal, Norway, and Paraguay all now generate more than 97% of their electricity from renewable sources.
