Good News for Humankind

The world’s latest milestones for climate, justice, freedom, peace, health, and more

November 18 – 24 2024 C.E.

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Hi beautiful people,

For many of us, this is supposed to be a week of gratitude and togetherness. And yet, for many, these last few weeks have been a time of mourning, confusion, rage, and fear. It’s a time when some feel quite distant from loved ones who have different beliefs or made different voting choices than us.

My invitation is if you can’t authentically be grateful for your life circumstances right now, then don’t. If you are still grieving, then keep grieving. But maybe you also can carve out a moment or two to remember the very foundations of what we are offered in this life. You can practice being grateful for this breath you are taking, for flowers and mountains, for the sound of rain on the roof, for the Sun shining beyond the storm.

The point is not to perform gratitude because that’s what’s expected this time of year. The point is that even in dark times, we are overwhelmed by beauty and goodness in this life. And it’s available to each of us right here, right now.

Happy Thanksgiving, Peter

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​Global child deaths from pneumonia have been cut in half since 2009​

Pneumonia kills 2,000 children under five worldwide every day, making it the world’s biggest infectious cause of death in children. The introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) has significantly lowered the burden of death and disease from pneumonia, but millions of children remain unvaccinated. Since the public-private global health partnership Gavi supported the first roll-out of the PCV vaccine in 2009, 438 million children of all ages have been vaccinated in 64 countries, averting an estimated total of 1.2 million deaths by the end of 2023.

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​Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in U.S. history​

New Mexico voters are sending 11 additional women to boost female representation in their state legislature. Women have made steady advances in statehouse representation across the country, with one notable surge in the 2018 election cycle almost entirely among Democrats in a trend associated with the #MeToo movement and political engagement linked to the election of Donald Trump. The share of women in all state legislatures across the United States combined roughly tripled from about 11% in 1980 to 33% in October 2024.

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​Rappahannock Tribe first in U.S. to enshrine rights of nature into constitution​

The Rappahannock Tribe in Virginia has become the first tribal nation in the U.S. to adopt a tribal constitution that grants legal rights to a river, specifically protecting the Rappahannock River’s rights to exist, flourish, and maintain clean water. The provisions allows legal cases on behalf of the river itself, with a tribal court system planned for 2025 to enforce these rights. The Rappahannock’s actions are part of a rights-of-nature movement that includes Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of these rights in 2008 and New Zealand granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017.

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​Australia to invest $125m in Pacific nations off-grid and community scale renewables​

The REnew Pacific program will help deliver off-grid and community-scale renewable energy in remote and rural parts of the Pacific, enabling lighting, access to water, improved agriculture, better food security, quality education and health services, reliable communications connectivity and enhanced incomes. Developing countries will require $US1.3 trillion annually by the 2030s to meet climate needs, according to a report released at COP29 by climate finance experts.

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​MIT will make tuition free for families earning less than $200,000 a year​

Families of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) making under $100,000 will not have to pay housing, dining, or other fees, and they’ll have an allowance for books and other personal expenses. Families who make more than $200,000 a year can still receive need-based financial aid. Tuition for the 2024-2025 academic year at MIT is nearly $62,000. Housing, dining, and other fees can add up to another $24,000 annually, making it an enormous burden for families or forcing students to go into decades of debt.

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#6

​Brazil to adopt full beef traceability by 2032​

Brazil will soon begin tracing individual cattle from birth to slaughter, aiming to make the sector 100% traceable by 2032, Agriculture and Livestock Minister Carlos Fávaro has indicated. The announcement comes amid growing international demand for transparency, especially as the EUDR, a new European Union regulation requiring proof that certain imported commodities aren’t adding to recent deforestation, is set to come into force at the end of 2025. Fávaro stated that a tracing platform would be working by 2027.

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​Paris to replace 60,000 parking spaces with trees​

Paris aims to replace 60,000 parking spaces across the city with trees by the end of this decade, according to its newly released climate plan. The plan lays out steps to help the city prepare for more extreme heat. The goal of ripping up parking spaces is part of a larger aim to create more than 700 acres of green space by 2030. The plan also calls for setting up more cooling centers, creating more car-free zones, and installing reflective roofs on 1,000 public buildings.

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​Colombia outlaws child marriage after 17-year campaign​

There are currently 4.5 million girls and women in Colombia who married before 18 – about one in four. Of these, a million were married before they were 15. Now, Colombian lawmakers have approved a bill to eradicate child marriage in the South American country after 17 years of campaigning by advocacy groups and eight failed attempts to push legislation through the house and senate. Colombia is now one of 12 countries out of the 33 in Latin America and the Caribbean to have entirely banned marriage under the age of 18, following Honduras, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.

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​Breakthrough genomic test identifies virtually any infection in one go​

Researchers at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a single genomic test that can quickly detect virtually any kind of pathogen in a patient. This allows for much quicker diagnoses, enables targeted treatment to begin sooner, and could lower healthcare costs. Over the course of 7 years, researchers led by UCSF professor Charles Chiu tested 4,828 patients’ samples with its clinical mNGS method. The mNGS test accurately identified 86% of neurological infections.

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​Local groups drive creation of new Puerto Rico marine protected area​

The marine protected area (MPA), named Jardines Submarinos de Vega Baja y Manatí or the Vega Baja and Manatí Underwater Gardens, spans 77 square miles and is the culmination of a 16-year effort by ­­a coalition of local communities and NGOs. It’s comprised of several critically important ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass beds, and is home to more than a dozen threatened species, including the greater Caribbean manatee and several species of sea turtles.

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​Robert Austrian, Jerome Gold, and colleagues develop world’s first pneumococcal vaccine (1977 C.E.)​

With the discovery of penicillin in 1928, interest in vaccines to prevent pneumonia waned. The assumption was that the problem would largely be eliminated by use of this antibiotic. Austrian and Gold, however, showed that, despite treatment with penicillin, deaths from pneumococcal pneumonia were unchanged in the first 96 hours of therapy. These efforts ultimately led to the licensing first of a 14-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide in 1977 followed by the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide in 1983.

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​Global child mortality rates drops below 2.5% for the first time in history (2040 C.E. ???)​

Across many historical societies, an estimated 48% of children died before the age of five. By 1950, this had dropped to 27%. By 2020, it had dropped below 5%. The global Sustainable Development Goals adopted by all U.N. member states in 2015 set out an ambitious goal to achieve less than 2.5%. A decade after the initial 2030 goal, the world finally achieves this monumental milestone for families and communities around the world by investing in a range of public health and poverty alleviation measures.

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These milestones have been added to the ​Archive of Human Genius​ – our database of social change milestones – past, present & future.