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.
Starting in 2026, new buildings under seven stories won’t be allowed to include stoves, furnaces or water heaters that burn gas and other fossil fuels. Larger buildings are required to comply starting in 2029.
After years of stalling due to opposition by the two former presidents with the country’s Indigenous policies, they are the first Indigenous lands to be demarcated since 2018.
The first of its kind in the world, the e-motorway that charges EVs while they drive may lead to an expansion of a further 3,000 km of electric roads in Sweden by 2045.
Japan’s first abortion pill won approval in 2023, and clinical trials there showed 93% of participants had a complete abortion within 24 hours using the two-pill combination. Until that vote, Japan had been one of the last developed nations offering only surgical options, including a method the World Health Organization calls obsolete. The ministry took the unusual step of opening a public comment period before deciding, drawing strong responses from doctors and advocates who had pushed for years. The approval is historic, though spousal consent requirements still shape who can actually access care. As reproductive rights contract in some countries and expand in others, Japan’s shift is a reminder that progress is uneven, hard-won, and worth celebrating wherever it lands.
Under the new reform, Indigenous communities will receive 5% of a mining operation’s profits. Concessions will no longer be granted in areas with water shortages or in protected areas.
The ban applies to all semiautomatic rifles less than 30 inches in length, as well as other semiautomatic firearms with features such as thumbhole stocks and additional hand grips.
Cochin International Airport has already been deemed the first ‘green airport’ in the world, for which it was awarded the ‘Champions of Earth’ award in 2018, the United Nation’s highest environmental honor.
Women voted at the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops for the first time in October 2023, after Pope Francis rewrote the rules to seat them as full participants. Five religious sisters joined five priests as voting representatives for religious orders, and Francis appointed 70 non-bishop members to the synod, asking that half be women. The meeting itself grew out of a two-year listening process that gathered the hopes of lay Catholics across dozens of countries — one of the largest such exercises in modern religious history. For an institution two thousand years old, even a measured shift like this one suggests something powerful: when a church commits to listening widely, the question of who gets to answer becomes harder to set aside.
Fifteen funders have already committed $102.5 million to support the Tribal Nations Conservation Pledge goals across the country since its launch in March.
Electric vehicles are on track to hit 14 million global sales in 2023, up from 10 million the year before — a jump that has analysts revising their forecasts upward yet again. The International Energy Agency now expects EVs to make up 35 percent of new car sales worldwide by 2030, a sharp leap from the 21 percent it predicted just one year earlier. The shift is showing up in unexpected places too: in India, more than half of all three-wheeled vehicles registered last year were electric, hinting at a faster, leapfrog path through the Global South. With oil demand now projected to peak as early as 2025, the economic logic of the transition is finally pointing the same direction as the climate logic.
