Today (2017 C.E. - 2025 C.E.)

This archive spans the years 2017 through 2025, a period marked by rapid advances in clean energy, medicine, technology, and social equity. It collects documented breakthroughs, policy wins, and scientific achievements from the present era. If you want evidence that progress is real and ongoing, this is where to look.

Aral Sea time lapse 1989 2014, for article on Aral Sea afforestation

Uzbekistan plants millions of acres of forest where the Aral Sea once lay

By / / Good News For Humankind

Aral Sea afforestation has covered 1.7 million hectares of dried lakebed with saxaul trees and other desert-tolerant plants over the past five years, transforming what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake into a slowly recovering landscape. The work is led on the ground by Karakalpak communities, where women gather seeds each autumn and men join planting crews through the winter. A single mature saxaul shrub can hold back several tons of moving sand, shielding nearby towns from the toxic dust storms that have driven respiratory illness for decades. It’s an imperfect, weather-dependent effort — but a hopeful model for how nature-based restoration can heal landscapes that seemed beyond saving.

A neuron or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell, for article on ALS synapse-regenerating pill

Breakthrough synapse-regenerating ALS pill moves to phase 2 human trials

By / / Good News For Humankind

A once-daily ALS pill designed to rebuild neural connections — not just slow their loss — has cleared FDA approval to begin Phase 2 trials, with patients across the U.S. starting doses in April 2024. SPG302 works on synapses, the tiny junctions where neurons talk to each other, which start vanishing before motor neurons themselves die. Every ALS drug currently on the market aims to slow decline; this one is being tested for whether it can actually help recover lost function. For the roughly 30,000 Americans living with ALS, that’s a genuinely different question to be asking. If it works, it could reshape how researchers approach neurodegenerative disease far beyond ALS.

Good news for public health, for article on CAB-LA HIV prevention, for article on lenacapavir HIV prevention, for article on HIV infections in young men

HIV transmissions in the U.S. dropped 12% between 2018 and 2002

By / / Good News For Humankind

HIV infections among young men in the U.S. dropped 30% between 2018 and 2022, the steepest decline of any age group in the latest CDC surveillance data. Researchers credit expanded testing, faster connection to treatment, and the growing reach of PrEP — a daily pill that cuts transmission risk by up to 99% when taken consistently. The South, long carrying the heaviest HIV burden in the country, saw the largest regional drop, and Black men experienced an 18% decline. Gaps remain, especially for transgender women and Latino gay men, but the news from this generation is genuinely hopeful: when prevention tools reach people early, they work. It’s a glimpse of what ending the epidemic could actually look like.

Packages of diapers, for article on Medicaid diaper coverage

Tennessee to become the first U.S. state to provide some children’s diapers

By / / Good News For Humankind

Free diapers through Medicaid are coming to Tennessee this August, with families receiving 100 a month for every child under two. It’s the first program of its kind in the country, and advocates expect it to deliver close to 100 million diapers a year to families who need them. The need is real: the National Diaper Bank Network found that 92% of Tennessee families receiving diaper assistance are working parents who still can’t afford enough. Local diaper banks helped lay the groundwork, and they’ll keep serving families the program doesn’t reach. Tennessee’s approach offers a tested path other states can follow, turning a quiet daily struggle into something a community can actually solve together.

Elderly Indian man, for article on home voting India

For the first time, India’s elderly and disabled are able to vote from home

By / / Good News For Humankind

Home voting came to India’s national elections for the first time in 2024, opening the ballot to citizens aged 85 and older and to voters with significant disabilities — a group that together numbers more than 17 million people across the country. A team of polling officials visits each home, collects the ballot in person, and videographs the process to protect both secrecy and trust. In Churu, Rajasthan, eight family members with disabilities voted together from their living room; in remote corners of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, elderly voters skipped journeys they could no longer make. In the largest election in human history, it’s a quiet but powerful reminder that democracies grow stronger when they bend toward their people, not the other way around.

Whale tail, for article on sei whale return

Sei whales reappear in Argentine waters after nearly 100 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sei whales are back in Argentina’s coastal waters for the first time in roughly 100 years, after industrial whaling wiped them out in the 1920s and 30s. These blue-grey giants are the third-largest whales on Earth and among the fastest, which once made them prime targets for hunters. Their slow return — the species reproduces just once every two or three years — is a quiet testament to the 1946 international whaling treaty that gave them room to rebuild. Global numbers now sit around 50,000 and are trending upward, though sei whales remain endangered. Their reappearance off Patagonia carries a hopeful lesson for marine conservation everywhere: give a species enough time and enough protection, and it can find its way home.

Aerial view of a geothermal power facility surrounded by tropical landscape for an article about Indonesia coal phase-out, for article on India coal capacity share

Coal’s share of power capacity in India drops below 50% for first time since 1960s

By / / Good News For Humankind

Coal now powers less than half of India’s electricity capacity for the first time since the 1960s — a quiet but historic line just crossed by the world’s most populous country. Renewables made up nearly three-quarters of the new capacity India added in the first quarter of 2024, and the country has already hit its 2030 goal of sourcing half its power from non-fossil sources, six years ahead of schedule. India has also climbed from ninth to third in global solar generation in less than a decade, behind only China and the United States. It’s a vivid reminder that when ambition, policy, and investment line up, energy transitions can move faster than almost anyone expected.

Howler monkey, for article on howler monkey rewilding

Brazil takes pioneering action to rewild howler monkeys

By / / Good News For Humankind

Brazil has launched its first national population management program for the brown howler monkey, a species now ranked among the 25 most threatened primates on Earth after yellow fever outbreaks killed thousands. Coordinated across eight states, the program pairs a newly adapted yellow fever vaccine with strategic translocations to restore wild populations. In Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park, two groups of howlers now live in an urban forest where the species had been absent for over a century. The effort offers a potential model for other imperiled Atlantic Forest species.

North Macedonia presidential handover 2024 Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, for article on North Macedonia first woman president

Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova elected North Macedonia’s first woman president

By / / Good News For Humankind

North Macedonia’s first woman president, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, has been welcomed into the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of current and former heads of state working to expand women’s leadership worldwide. A constitutional law professor before entering politics, she brings decades of work on democratic reform to an office no woman in her country had ever held. Her election matters in a global landscape where fewer than 10 percent of heads of government are women. Each new name on that list shifts what’s imaginable for the next generation, and signals quiet progress in a movement that grows one leader, one country, at a time.

Molly Cook, for article on LGBTQ+ Texas Senate

Molly Cook just became the first out LGBTQ+ person elected to the Texas Senate

By / / Good News For Humankind

Molly Cook just became the first openly LGBTQ+ person ever elected to the Texas Senate, winning her Houston-area special election with 57% of the vote. An emergency room nurse and sixth-generation Texan, she built her campaign around a simple idea: the laws passed in Austin show up in her ER, whether it’s a miscarriage complication under the state’s abortion ban or a neighbor freezing after the power grid fails. Her win places an out senator in a chamber that has produced some of the country’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Representation in rooms like this one doesn’t change everything overnight, but it changes who has to be seen, and that’s how long-standing ceilings start to crack.