Hope Is A Verb - The Good News You Missed In 2024

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Depending on where you get your news, 2024 probably sounded like a complete disaster. And while a lot of terrible things happened, not everything that happened in the world was terrible. From breakthrough treatments for HIV and obesity, to the rise in global happiness and the decline in deforestation in the Amazon – there were a lot of bright glimmers of progress that you just didn’t hear about.   Go to our website to read the full list of our 86 Stories of Progress from 2024. Other topics discussed: our word of the year (hint – it’s not "brain rot"); the surprising news about global reproductive rights; the good news for obesity; how 90 million kids got fed at school; the medical breakthrough of 2024; LGBTQ+ victories in Thailand & Greece; China’s 3000 kilometre green wall; the hidden stories of hope in Gaza and Ukraine; why 2025 is going to be a big year in the Amazon; how the clean energy transition is fuelling hope for future; the biggest environmental story of the year; incredible wins for animals; and why stories of progress matter now more than ever. This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

A thousand days into this nightmare, the civilian body can't grunt. Former US President Donald Trump has survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally. Airstrikes have hit the southern suburbs of Beirut in the past few hours. Seems like Florida really can't catch a break. Inflation is sticking around, so life is not about to get easy. A shocking new report that details a catastrophic decline in wildlife. Devastation in Spain, where more than 200 people have died after a catastrophic flash flooding there earlier this week.

The Director General of the World Health Organization has declared monkeypox an international public health emergency. They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. The cost of living is hitting harder than ever before. The massive blaze is now threatening multiple communities in Western Canada. We're declaring a nationwide evacuation.

Israel has claimed striking over 200 targets in Lebanon since Saturday morning. A spiraling emergency after Hurricane Helene, the mounting death toll, at least 182 lives lost, hundreds still unaccounted for. President Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for Russia's use of its nuclear weapons. There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. For a lot of us, this was the soundtrack of 2024, which is why it might come as a bit of a surprise

that despite all the shocks, setbacks and downswings, a lot of good things actually happened in the world this year and big things like progress on global health, human rights, conservation, renewable energy and, yes, even democracy. Every year, a whole bunch of organisations come out with their word of the year. This year, Oxford Dictionary's was brain rot. Collins Dictionary had brat as their word of the year.

Macquarie Dictionary had enshitification, which is a word that describes what happens to basically every single digital platform. And The Economist's word of the year this year was kakistocracy, that describes what happens to basically every single digital platform. And the Economist's word of the year this year was kakistocracy, which is a wonderful word meaning governed by the worst people in your society. It's not hard to understand where that one is coming from. But I think, Amy, if you were going to ask me for one word that really sums up 2024,

it would probably be the word crisis, which is a word that I have seen used this year, perhaps more than any other year that I can remember. We had a climate crisis, an inflation crisis. We had a crisis for democracy, crisis of governance, the obesity crisis, an environmental crisis on our hands, the crisis in the Middle East, the crisis in Gaza, the crisis in Ukraine, humanitarian crises, a hunger crisis.

You name it, there's probably a crisis for it. In fact, there's even a crisis for crisis, which is a word that historian Adam Tooze has come up with, the polycrisis, which describes kind of the combination of all of these different crises overlapping and interacting with each other. And I think it's a word that very aptly sums up the feeling that a lot of people have about this current moment in history. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really true. I think for a lot of people this year sparked a real crisis of meaning and it really rattled our confidence in the stories

that we tell ourselves about the world and also a lot of our ideas about how we thought the world was meant to be. I think that's right and I think that includes ourselves. We have had a couple of pretty dark moments this year where the way we thought things were turned out not to be the way things actually are. And for those of us who believe in rationalism and liberal democracy and that evidence should be sacred, that turns out maybe not to have been as true as we once thought it was. Yeah, I think that once again, we learned that the story of the world is always much bigger

and way more complex than we would like it to be. And it's interesting that you use the word crisis because I read somewhere that the Greek root of the word crisis actually means to sift. And in that context, the world was really shaken up this year. And when things didn't go our way and when we didn't get the outcomes that we were wanting, it really forced us to get clear about what is important and how we want to show up. I can't help but think that the opposite of crisis is obviously opportunity, but also that those two things are intimately intertwined, that usually you don't actually get an opportunity without the crisis in the first place.

So that's been on my mind. But something else that's been on my mind is that when I think about that word crisis, I've also been asking myself this year, a crisis for who? Yeah. And we have been compiling our big end of year good news list. And as I've been going through all of these different stories, I have to be honest.

I've had to start asking myself, well, was this year a year of crisis for the tens of millions of people who gained access to electricity or water or sanitation? Or the tens of millions of students who attended school for the first time? Or the 90 million or so school kids who got fed at school thanks to different school feeding programs around the world?

What about the millions of LGBTQ people in Thailand who were granted the right to get married this year for the first time? Or all of those people in Greece became the first Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage. And I think as I've dived deeper and deeper into this end of year list, I've also started thinking, well, maybe it wasn't a crisis for a lot of people. In fact, depending on how you look at it, maybe 2024 was actually a pretty great year. So I think what you just said there is exactly why a list like

this matters. Because when you start curating these stories and putting them side by side, you will start to find connections that maybe you wouldn't see otherwise. And I think every person who reads this list is going to find their own connections and create their own meaning and story about the year. And I'm speaking from experience because this was my first year of being hands-on with putting this list together. And as I've been in it, I was trying to figure out how many years have you been doing this list? I don't actually remember. It's lost in the mists of time, but I suspect it might've been 2015 or 2016 maybe when this list first appeared. But the whole point of the list is to kind of remind people

that most of the progress that happens in the world over the course of 12 months is completely invisible to us because those stories don't make the headlines, they don't get our attention. And yet when you go back over these stories, and this year I think that we found 3,000 or 4,000 stories and we published those in our newsletter. And going back over those literally thousands of stories,

it's very, very, very difficult to go through that process and not kind of come out at least thinking, well, I think that the scales might at the very least have been balanced this year. And that's not the story of 2024 that most people will be walking away with, right? And this is what we do at the end of the year. As humans, we take everything that's happened,

all the events, and we turn it into a story that makes sense to us. I think it's that part of us that needs to make meaning. And as I'm speaking in real time, I guess that's why these end of year reviews in mainstream media are always so popular. But I've got to say, it's also a lot of work. I mean, after so many years of doing this, what keeps you coming back? This process is always just such great medicine. I think it speaks to the idea that we really do have a negativity bias. Before I do this list, if you ask me to name all of the bad

news stories from 2024, I probably could have reeled them off pretty easily, but it would have been much harder for me to recall all the big stories of progress that happened in 2024. And yet going back over things, I was continually blown away by how many truly world-changing stories of progress that happened in 2024. And yet, going back over things, I was continually blown away by how many truly world-changing stories of progress we actually saw in 2024. I mean, Science, the magazine, recently announced that their breakthrough of the year is a new HIV drug called linacapavir,

which in June was shown to prevent HIV through a twice yearly shot with 100% effectiveness, which is just unheard of. Drugs don't do things with 100% effectiveness. And apparently when they announced this at the UNAIDS conference, the whole audience spontaneously stood up and started applauding. And since then, things have been moving pretty quickly. By October, Gilead, the maker of this drug, had agreed to supply it at low cost to something like 120 low- and middle-income countries. And in December, they announced that they're now starting trials

of a version of the drug that only has to be injected once a year, which means that that's the closest thing to a vaccine that we've yet discovered for HIV, which is a disease that still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. So that's just one story, for example. The other story that I loved this year that I think was a really big deal was the story of school meals, which is something that you and I have both been really into

and really enthusiastic about, but it's very, very difficult to find any kind of reporting on it. Yeah, this is one of those stories. And this is what I love so much about our work is that, you know, the headline sounds pretty straightforward and it might even be one of those things that you'd skip over if you saw it in a basket of a hundred other stories. But by giving kids one nutritious whole meal every day at school especially in these lower income countries where these programs are rolling out that one meal impacts malnutrition rates attendance rates literacy rates it literally changes the future of these kids which in turn

changes the future of the country it's one of those initiatives that kind of feels small at the start, but when you pay attention to it, you just watch the impact snowball. And it feels like school meals this year just ramped up all around the world. Absolutely. I mean, this is an idea that has just totally caught fire for pretty obvious reasons, because I think research shows that if you provide kids one meal, it brings you a social and economic benefit that's nine times greater than the cost of providing that meal

in the first place. And so we've seen the number of kids being fed at school go from 319 million around the world before the pandemic to over 480 million this year. That's something like a quarter of all the world's children are now getting at least one nutritious meal at school. 104 countries have now signed up to something called the Global School Meals Coalition.

And we saw some really huge announcements this year. Nigeria promised to expand its school meals program from 10 million children to 20 million children by next year. And Kenya announced that its world-leading school meals program, they're planning to extend it from 2 million to 10 million children by the end of the decade. But the biggest announcement was from Indonesia, which promised that it's going to provide, and listen to this,

free school meals to every single child at school in the entire country, which means that we're looking at 78 million children who are going to be provided with one nutritious meal a day before the end of this decade. That is change on a scale that is almost impossible to get your head around. Honestly, I feel like if we just published that one story as our entire list, people would walk away feeling like 2024 was an incredible year because it's one of those really simple ideas that is such a game changer. Absolutely. But there's so much more.

I mean, this year was an amazing year for disease elimination again. I think we saw something like seven or eight countries eliminate diseases that in some cases have been around for millennia. Egypt, home to 100 million people, eliminated malaria, which is a disease that has been there for at least 6,000 years. They found evidence of it in the mummy of King Tutankhamen. Jordan became the first country to eliminate leprosy, which is a disease that pops up again and again in our most ancient texts. We saw diseases like trachoma, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness. We saw those eliminated in multiple countries around the world. We also saw pretty good progress on the world's deadliest infectious disease, which is tuberculosis. Last year, 150,000 fewer people died from TB.

And here's the crucial piece of that. The greatest progress has happened in Africa, which has seen TB deaths come down by more than any other region in the world in the last five or six years. So that's super encouraging. And we also saw some pretty good news on malaria, which is something that you and I here at Fix the News

have been talking a lot about, both on the podcast, but also more importantly, in the development of a special series that we've been putting together on the malaria vaccine. Yeah, I'm really excited about this documentary. And I think what has really stood out for me is that once you start lifting the lid on something like the malaria vaccine rollout, or any big public health initiative, is just how much is involved in getting these things out there. I mean, to eliminate a disease or vaccinate a country, these are truly epic feats. And for me, just knowing what's involved makes me pay a whole lot of attention to these stories because nothing about this work is easy. And every time I see one of those headlines in our newsletter, it honestly feels like a mini miracle has just been pulled off.

And I know that global health is one of your favourite topics. So what else caught your attention this year? I think the other thing that really stands out this year was that even in some of the darkest places, we saw rays of light. And the one that really struck me was the polio vaccination campaign that took place in Gaza. This is a story that I think just should have received way more coverage.

So in June or July, they picked up traces of polio for the first time, because of course, none of the kids were getting vaccinated in Gaza. And by September, October, humanitarian workers had sprung into action. And by working in nine-hour humanitarian pauses, they were able to reach more than half a million kids and give all of those kids a first dose of the polio vaccine. But here's the really amazing part. They were then able to come back for a second round in November and give the kids the second dose of the polio vaccine. And again, they reached more than half a million kids.

So something like nine in 10 kids in Gaza got vaccinated this year for polio amidst what can only be described as the most horrifying conditions. And while that doesn't make things okay, it shows that in even the worst places and the darkest places in the world, there are people who are willing to step up and who are willing to help. I think those people have become a big part of the story of 2024 for me. There were so many reminders this year that it really is people who drive progress, which is what this podcast is all about. And that theme of finding bright sparks in the darkness was actually something I spotted

in quite a few of our environmental stories. One of my favorites this year came out of Ukraine. stories. One of my favourites this year came out of Ukraine. We all remember that horrible hydroelectric power plant disaster that happened last year. But what a lot of people don't know is that the river has already resumed its original flow patterns and that 40% of that reservoir land is already covered with forests. And some of those new trees are four metres tall. And the species were actually native to the area before the reservoir was created. You know, it just shows that nature never forgets what to do. And now ecologists in Ukraine are pushing back on the plans to rebuild the dam because they've seen what happens when you let nature recover. And really, this is the perfect segue into what is probably, if not the

best environmental story of 2024. And that is the story of the Klamath River in America and the removal of the four dams. Now this is, you know, we've been following this story for a while. It was the biggest dam removal project that the world has ever seen. And this year it was completed, you know, which was not only a feat of environmental engineering, but when you think about the decades of campaigning by local tribes, the work of environmentalists to make that plan happen, the government involvement, of environmentalists to make that plan happen, the government involvement, the infrastructure requirements, and just how all those pieces had to come together and that it was completed on budget and ahead of schedule. And how's this for like the icing on the cake? Within just one month, salmon came back to these waters again. It was the first time that they've been seen in the climate for over 60 years, which is a huge sign of recovery. You know, the more I think about this story,

the more it just takes my breath away. What else did you find amongst some of the environmental progress stories that really stood out for you? I think one of the most important stories, and this is one that we have been tracking for a while, was the decline of deforestation in the Amazon. I mean, it was also featured in our roundup of 2023. And this is definitely the kind of trend that you want to see repeated. This year, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon plummeted by 30%. So it was its lowest level in nine years. And deforestation in Colombia dropped by 38%, which meant that it hit a 23-year low. And it's really worth pointing out that, you know, both of these milestones happened despite a really sharp increase in wildfires.

You know, there was actually a lot of good work done in this part of the world. Bolivia created new protected areas. I think there were four. There was a new state park created that, you know, now safeguards some of the oldest and the tallest trees in the rainforest. And a new study came out that actually showed that over 62% of the rainforest is now under some form of conservation management, which is a lot more than what we originally thought. And of course, like a big part of that protection goes back to local communities. We know that areas of the rainforest that are in the hands of Indigenous people have higher biodiversity rates.

They have less deforestation. And that's probably why one of the most important trends from the Amazon this year was actually around land rights. Peru granted a record number of Indigenous land titles this year. In Brazil, the Munduruku people won their case and reclaimed the rights to their land, which I think from memory was the size of about 250,000 soccer fields. And perhaps the biggest story of this year was, you know, the big legal victory for the Sequoia Nation, who for centuries lived along what is now the border between Ecuador

and Peru. And in 2025, they're going to return to their ancestral home in the Western Amazon for the first time in 80 years. And the big thing about these kinds of legal victories is that it starts to set a legal precedent for millions of other Indigenous people across the Amazon. And I think this is going to be one thread of stories that is going to be worth paying attention to next year. My favorite environmental story of the year, I think, came from China, actually. I had no idea that this was in place, but apparently since the 1970s, China has been busy with this. The only word that describes this is gargantuan tree planting effort to try and stop desertification. And this year, they completed the first phase of that.

I love that it's the first phase after a 50-year project. They finished the first phase, which is that they encircled a 3,000-kilometer green wall around one of the deserts there to stop desertification. And that they have planted hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of trees already to create a kind of green belt to push the desert back. It's the largest ecological restoration project on the planet

and it was almost nowhere in any headlines that we saw in 2024. Yeah, it's crazy. And a lot of tree planting happened all around the world this year. And it's one of those trends where countries have set themselves these pretty big, audacious targets. And a lot of them made really substantial progress. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has now achieved 90% of its 1 billion trees program. Kenya planted 241 million trees thanks to this app that lets citizens know what type of trees they should be planting in their area. And one of my favourite ones was that the Philippines passed two laws

that requires parents to plant two trees for every child that they have and then students have to plant two trees when they graduate. What else? Any other big kind of environmental trends that you spotted this year? Okay, it's not a big trend. It's actually one of the smaller ones, but I feel like it has a kind of outsized impact. And that's wildlife crossings, which are, you know, sometimes they're bridges, sometimes they're tunnels, but they allow animals to cross over things like highways much more safely. I mean, it's a really

effective conservation tool that has been around for a while now. And this year in California, construction began on the world's largest wildlife bridge. And it's actually going to allow animals like mountain lions and bobcats and deer a safe passage over this 10 lane freeway. You know, both this wildlife crossing story and the Klamath story, they felt like these time capsules because if you went back to when these dams and these highways were constructed, those structures would have been seen as progress because at the time we measured our progress by our ability to override the natural world. But in 2024, progress is now about our ability to protect nature and to make amends for some of these mistakes, which means that we're putting bridges for wildlife over our highways. We're dismantling our dams. And even though these initiatives have been in the works for at least a decade,

I think this is the magic of a list like this is when you put these two things together, you start thinking about how a lot of the progress that we're seeing, especially in the environmental space, is actually undoing the traditional progress from like 50 years ago. I think that's a really important point. It kind of speaks to the artificiality of creating a good news list for just one year. Because the truth is that so many of these stories take place over years. In fact, most often these stories take place over decades. And so we might see that story finally come to fruition in 2024,

but it might have been started by a small group of activists 10 years ago or back in the 1990s. And in some cases, it started midway through the 20th century. And it's not always about rectifying mistakes either. Sometimes it's about admitting to mistakes that we've been making for as long as human beings have been around. My favorite example of that this year was that we suddenly start to be seeing a kind of groundswell

against the idea of corporal punishment, against the idea of beating kids. In much of the rich world, that has already taken place. But it wasn't that long ago where it was widely accepted that it was okay to punish children by hitting them. Places like Germany, for example, only banned corporal punishment, I think, in the year 2000. It's only been one or two generations

that kids have been free of smacking and beating at school. But we're now seeing that idea start to spread to other places around the world. And one of my favorite hidden stories of progress from 2024 was that in early November, while the eyes of the world were on one of my favorite hidden stories of progress from 2024 was that in early November, while the eyes of the world were on the US election, there was a big UN meeting that took place in Bogota in Colombia, where something like 18 countries either agreed to or kind of finalized their process of committing to end corporal punishment, either for children in schools or

for children throughout the entire country. And over 100 countries signed up to some kind of pledge to ban or end corporal punishment, which is just kind of mind-blowing progress. It means that we're looking at hundreds of millions of children that will be free from being beaten very, very soon within the next few years and certainly within the next generation. And that's the kind of change that's very, very soon within the next few years and certainly within the next generation. And that's the kind of change that's very, very difficult to get your head around and certainly not the kind of change that makes for easy headlines. But I would argue that that is a fundamental break with the past

and a clear dividing line between a world that once was and a better future for everyone. Yeah, and this is such a great example of something else that you and I have chatted a lot about this year. And that is when you read about an incredible solution that's at play in the world, most of the time you are finding out about a problem that a lot of people around the world,

we wouldn't think that corporal punishment is still an issue. And this is exactly what these stories of progress do. They give you a much more comprehensive picture about where the world is at. And I think that fuller picture is so important. You know, one of my other favourite stories this year was that I can't count the number of headlines that told us that Gen Z are doomed or that Gen Z have a mental health crisis or that the phones are killing the kids or that social media is causing a mental health crisis. It's just headline after headline. But again, it kind of comes back to saying, well, hold on, who are you talking about here?

Because four-fifths of Gen Z worldwide live in low or middle income countries. And for that four-f fifths of a generation, they're living lives that are better, they're wealthier, they're more educated, they have access to more opportunities, they're better connected, they're better informed than their parents were. And if you spoke to that generation and told them that there was a crisis in the world,

they would look at you and say, well, what on earth are you talking about? We're very excited about the future. And that is kind of borne out in the world, they would look at you and say, well, what on earth are you talking about? We're very excited about the future. And that is kind of borne out in the data. Here was one of the most surprising reports that I saw this year, which is that Gallup puts up this report every year called the World Emotions Report, where they survey, I think it's the biggest survey in the world.

They get 1,000 respondents from 142 countries, so 146,000 people are surveyed. And in their most recent annual survey, they showed that the world is now in a better place emotionally than it was at the height of the pandemic. That younger people are the most positive, but even those of us in our 30s and 40s and older actually feel better than we have in years.

And global negative emotions have started declining for the first time since 2014. Something like 77% of the world reported that they felt more positive emotions than negative emotions in the last year. And that's a very different picture to what we're seeing in the news. We're supposed to be living through the scariest time in living memory, the time of polycrisis, the time of terror and fear

and the world falling apart. And yet most people in the world are happier now than they have been in years. And that's very hard to explain unless you understand that the news doesn't tell us what's happening in the world. The news tells us what's going wrong. Yeah. And this is exactly why these stories matter so much. The more that you bank, the more it changes and expands your worldview. And I've experienced this personally over the last four years. It completely reshapes how you look at the world and that impacts how you show up in the world. And it's just really empowering.

For me, it allows me to hold both stories simultaneously. And I think a really good example of that is what's happening with climate and what's happening with energy. I am incredibly well informed about everything that is happening with climate. And 2024 has been a terrifying year, because it's the year that we have officially breached the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit. It looks like we're going to come out to something like 1.6 degrees Celsius above average global temperatures by the end of the year. That means that we're seeing global temperatures increase faster and we're seeing greater anomalies than scientists predicted.

And I don't think anyone can look at what's happening around the world and not be really, really scared for the future. And that story is a really important story to hold. And it's a story that is a big part of my own personal conception and understanding of the world. And it gives me a lot of fear about the future. But the other story that I'm holding is the story of the clean energy transition. And this year, once again, the deployment of clean energy has blown every single forecast out of the water.

Deployment of clean energy has blown every single forecast out of the water. That we are on track this year to deploy more than 600 gigawatts of solar, which means that we are installing a nuclear plant's worth of solar power every 12 hours somewhere in the world. And that progress has been led by China, which is by far the most important country when it comes to climate change in the world, because China accounts for 30% of global carbon emissions. What happens in China determines what happens with our global climate. Everyone's really worried about what Trump means for climate change, but the United States only accounts for

about a tenth of global carbon emissions. And in fact, carbon emissions have been declining in the United States for more than a decade. So it's really in China where the climate crisis kind of lives and dies. And China's deployment of clean energy this year has been more rapid than anyone predicted, to the point where we are going to come very, very close this year to seeing a peak in Chinese carbon emissions. And that's happened years ahead of schedule. It doesn't mean that fossil fuels aren't still being deployed. But what it does mean is that the clean energy transition is happening more rapidly than anyone predicted. And that thanks to the falling costs of wind and solar, and in particular batteries, which have just had an extraordinary year, we've seen battery prices

decline by something like more than 50%. When you add those batteries to renewable energy, when you add them to wind and solar plants, they make wind and solar more deployable. That means that you can deploy them in more areas. It means that they last longer. It means that you can use that electricity when the wind isn't blowing or when the sun isn't shining. And of course, when you put those batteries into cars,

it means that you don't have to blow up dinosaur juice into the cans anymore. And in China, more than 50% of cars sold now have batteries in them. Again, something which has happened far quicker than any analyst predicted even a few years ago. So I think the ability to hold the climate crisis and the energy transition in your mind at the same time and understand how scary climate change is, but also understand that the clean energy transition is happening faster than anyone predicted and that global carbon emissions are not headed for the kind of catastrophic levels that we

thought they might a decade ago. That is a story of qualified progress, giving me a lot of hope for the future. You know, it does feel like as daunting as all of this feels right now, we did put a lot of guardrails in place this year. You know, I feel like the EU's nature restoration law was an incredible example of this. I mean, that is just signalling a really profound shift in behaviour and relationship to the planet. I actually can't believe how excited I now get

about environmental legal reform now. What have you done to me? But this one has set a framework that 27 member states of the EU are now legally required to restore at least 20% of their land and 20% of their sea by 2050. And this is huge news for, you know, a place that has some of the most degraded ecosystems on the planet. Yeah.

I saw a lot of those really great legal changes happen actually in the area of human rights. Abortion and reproductive rights have been in the news a lot this year, but that's because America basically makes the news worldwide. And what most people don't realize is that America is actually an outlier. That 60 countries around the world have made their abortion laws more liberal in the last 30 years, and only four have made them more restrictive. And of course, one of those is America. And even so, seven US states voted this year to enshrine a woman's right to choose in their

constitutions. Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, and Missouri. France became the first country to make abortion a constitutional right this year. Poland reversed its restrictive measures on abortion and access to the morning after pill. Ireland and Canada extend free contraception to all women. And in sub-Saharan Africa, this one blew me away. The number of women using modern contraception

has nearly doubled in the last decade, reaching 66 million. That's not going to make headlines anywhere, but that is a story of real change because we know that when women gain access to contraception, it gives them more choice, and we see better outcomes both for themselves and for their children. This has been a good year legally. After 17 years of campaigning by advocacy groups and

eight failed legislative attempts. Colombia finally outlawed child marriage. Sierra Leone introduced new legislation that makes even witnesses to child marriage liable to imprisonment. And Zambia raised their minimum marriage age to 18, which is a pretty big step for a country that has 1.7 million child brides. The Netherlands became the 17th EU state to classify non-consensual sex as rape.

Croatia introduced the harshest penalties for femicide and this one was a big relief. Lawmakers in the Gambia rejected a bill that would have overturned a 2015 ban on female genital mutilation. So a number of legal wins worldwide for women and for children. And going back over the list, a reminder that America isn't the only country in the world and that a lot

of the news happens outside of the spotlight. It sure does. And legal reform is definitely one of those invisible threads. But, you know, when we talk about changing the story, invisible threads. But, you know, when we talk about changing the story, this is what a change of law does. And I think this is why people fight so hard for the reform to happen. And they're such unsung stories. I mean, that Columbia story about overturning child marriage, they had eight legislative attempts at that. And I just imagine what that must be like to campaign for 17 years. You know, you've been campaigning for most of the 21st century to try and get these laws overturned. And finally, in 2024, it takes place. The people behind that are just such incredible heroes. And I wish that we knew more about them than that.

They kind of received equal billing with the pop stars and sports stars that we're so used to seeing in the headlines. Yeah. And I think a really big example of that was animal activists. I feel like this is the year where a lot of those efforts, like those years of campaigning and advocacy really paid off because this year signaled the end of some of the world's oldest and cruelest practices. Romania became the 22nd country in Europe to ban fur farming. Colombia committed to end bullfighting, which is huge. Chile became the third South American country to abolish cosmetic testing. And across Asia, there were huge strides made in ending the trade of dog and cat meat. And South Korea actually made dog meat illegal. Yeah. What about animal restoration or species recovery stories that stood out for you? Yeah, I love a good comeback story. And

there were a lot of them, especially in the ocean. All of our conservation efforts and crackdowns on illegal fishing, they really started to pay off. Pacific bluefin tuna rebounded a decade ahead of schedule. Southern bluefin tuna was delisted as threatened. It was a great year for whales. A lot of fish stocks recovered. But on land, we also had quite a few wins. We managed to protect giant pandas, lynx, endangered woodpeckers, the Siamese crocodile and our Australian saltwater crocs. But what I think I loved most were the stories around reintroducing keystone species. A lot of animals returned home this year. Wild horses returned to Kazakhstan, southern white rhinos returned to South Africa, jaguars returned to Argentina, which of course is a story that we're really familiar with because

Chris Tompkins, who was involved in that work, was our first guest on the podcast this season. And one of my favorite stories is the bison. And this year there was a historic agreement to really protect them that was signed by America, Canada, and Mexico. And so there are now 31,000 bison roaming the prairies of those countries again. 31,000 bison roaming the prairies of those countries again. Like all the other sections this year, there were so many stories. And I feel like we've already covered a lot in this conversation. Are there any other stories from 2024 that you feel are really important to talk about? We would be remiss not to finish off this year's list by talking about democracy and freedom. More people voted in democratic elections this year than in any other year in history,

something like a billion people worldwide. Yeah, I think it was close to 70 elections were held around the world this year. And a lot of people said at the beginning of this year that a lot of things could go wrong. But actually looking back over the year, it has been something of a mixed bag, but not nearly as bad as a lot of people were predicting. And we saw a lot of really bright spots. We saw the overthrow of a pretty repressive government in Bangladesh. We saw a big pushback against the kind of more authoritarian tendencies

of the Indian government in their election. We saw free and fair democratic elections in Indonesia, which is one of the biggest countries in the election. We saw free and fair democratic elections in Indonesia, which is one of the biggest countries in the world. In the United States, after a lot of anxiety and worries about possible violence and challenges to the peaceful transition of power, that has gone off almost entirely without a hitch. And that if you look at the state of American democracy, it seems to be in pretty good health,

although that is no guarantee for what is going to happen in the future. But the top story of the year for me has got to be in pretty good health, although that is no guarantee for what is going to happen in the future. But the top story of the year for me has got to be what's happened in December with the overthrow of the truly, what can only be described as a truly evil person in the form of Assad in Syria. And coming back again to where we started, just thinking about those tens of thousands of people in Syria's notorious prisons who have been released and are seeing the light of day for the first time, some of them for the first time in years or decades.

And the kind of lifting of a darkness that has been on that land for generations. And there is no guarantee about what's going to happen in the future there or where things are headed. But just that moment of light in a place that has been so dark for so long, I think is something well worth acknowledging. So we've both been buried deep in these lists for weeks now. Have you changed your mind about anything as a result? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think the best way to answer it is with the thing that I found

most challenging about curating this story and choosing which stories made the list. Because when you are reading through all of the summaries, every story feels important. And I mean, obviously we can't publish a list of every story that we wrote this year because no one would read it. But I found it really hard to draw those lines. I really understood how every little piece counts. How about you? I mean, after all these years of doing this work, what surprised you this year?

I think this year more than any other, and it's always like this, it always feels like it's been a year of bad news headlines. But this year has felt more like that than any other year that I can remember. And yet going back over the year, I don't think I've ever seen a year with bigger numbers. It's like 200 million children have gained access to water and sanitation at schools. Half a billion children are getting fed worldwide. A billion people who suffer from obesity worldwide

now have a chance thanks to GLP-1 drugs, which might eventually turn out to be one of the most important medicines in global history. 17 African countries started rolling out the malaria vaccine this year. One of my favorite stories this year was that I found out that child mortality in Southeast Asia has declined from

5 million children a year in the 1990s to 1.3 million children today, which is awful because 1.3 million children are still dying every year, but below the age of five. But what that means is that there are tens of millions of children alive today who wouldn't have made it a generation ago. And those children are getting better access to education, they're getting water and electricity and internet access and it gives me so much hope for the future and it's just such a powerful reminder that progress continues out of sight, out of mind, that the tectonic plates of history don't get moved

by the stuff that you see in the headlines, they get moved by this kind of quieter, underlying, much bigger scale of progress and And that's really important. It is important. And it's also important to remember that most of these big shifts happen because someone somewhere or a small group of people in a corner of the world decided to roll up their sleeves and do something about it. You know, and they keep showing up, as you said, for decades

to change these stories for the world. As many of the people who are responsible for these stories of progress will tell you, that's what it takes. These things take years, but I believe now more than ever that the last 25 years have actually been incredible years of progress and this progress will continue. And that next year, in 2025, when we put this list together again, once again, we are going to be amazed by how much has happened

and how many things have improved in the lives of so many people. If there's one thing that we're walking away from 2024 with, it's knowing that despite all the crisis and all the darkness, the world actually managed to keep some lights on this year. And it even switched on some new ones. Believe it or not, the stories we shared today have only scratched the surface of our roundup of 2024. If you want to read the full list, head to fixanews.com.

It's free. And if you want to keep hearing more of these stories, you can subscribe to our newsletter and to this podcast because if this year is anything to go by, 2025 is subscribe to our newsletter and to this podcast. Because if this year is anything to go by, 2025 is going to be one to watch. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal and the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. If you enjoyed this conversation

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