Pakistan milestones | Good News for Humankind

Pakistan vaccinates 45 million children against polio as cases drop sharply in 2026

By Peter Schulte / September 30, 2026 / Good News For Humankind

Polio vaccination in Pakistan isn’t a once-a-year event; it’s a repeated campaign aimed at the same roughly 45 million children under five, delivered three times over on average in 2026 alone. Four separate campaigns, two nationwide and two targeting high-risk districts, have put polio drops in children’s mouths more than 135.9 million times this year. That sustained effort continues a decline already underway: cases fell from 74 in 2024 to 31 in 2025, and now stand at just four in 2026.

Rooftop solar, for article on Pakistan rooftop solar

Rooftop solar is now Pakistan’s largest source of electricity, driven by citizens

By Peter Schulte / July 13, 2026 / Good News For Humankind

Rooftop solar in Pakistan now supplies roughly a fifth of the country’s electricity — built almost entirely with private money, in just a few years, with no government subsidy behind it. In 2025 alone, Pakistan imported 26 gigawatts of solar panels from China, more than any other country on Earth. Millions of households, fed up with outages stretching 16 to 20 hours a day and bills that tripled over a decade, simply bought their way out. The hard caveat: as wealthier households leave the grid, those who can’t afford panels carry more of the shared costs. But Pakistan’s bottom-up, citizen-funded story is already reshaping how the world thinks about energy transitions in fast-growing nations.

Mangrove forest, for article on Pakistan mangrove restoration

Pakistan has expanded mangroves nearly threefold between 1986 and 2020

By / February 5, 2024 / Good News For Humankind

Pakistan’s mangrove forests have nearly tripled since 1986, growing from about 48,000 hectares to 144,000 hectares — a striking reversal of the global pattern of mangrove loss. Most of that expansion sits in the Indus Delta, where roughly 100,000 people depend on healthy mangroves for fishing livelihoods. The recovery has been driven by an unusual mix: provincial forest departments, international scientific partnerships, carbon credit financing, and fishing villages whose residents work as nursery hands and patrol against illegal cutting. In one coastal town, a single nursery holds 50,000 saplings ready for planting. As coastlines worldwide face rising seas and intensifying storms, Pakistan’s quietly persistent restoration offers a real-world template for what sustained, community-rooted conservation can achieve.

River dolphin, for article on river dolphin declaration

11 countries sign global pact to protect endangered river dolphins

By / January 15, 2024 / Good News For Humankind

River dolphins just got their first global lifeline: 11 countries have signed the Global Declaration for River Dolphins, a pact aiming to double Asian populations and halt declines across South America by 2030. It’s a meaningful turn for a group of species that has lost nearly three-quarters of its numbers since the 1980s. The hope isn’t abstract — China’s Yangtze finless porpoise population grew 23% over five years under strict protections, and the Indus river dolphin has nearly doubled in two decades. Because dolphins signal the health of the rivers nearly a billion people depend on, their recovery points toward something larger: that coordinated, community-rooted conservation can still pull ecosystems back from the brink.