This festive-looking salamander was the unlikely source of some of 2025’s good news.
At a glance
- Extreme poverty fell to a new low, while global education levels continued to rise.
- Global population growth has peaked and is expected to stabilise later this century.
- The rollout of a new malaria vaccine and advances in regenerative medicine marked a year of breakthroughs.
- The ozone layer continued to heal, and renewables are set to overtake coal.
The Christmas holiday season reminds Christians and non-Christians alike to give thanks for the year’s blessings. And despite what is frequently claimed, the vast majority of the global population lives in what looks like the best of times.
Yes, the world has many problems. Professor Max Roser, an Oxford University specialist in data analytics, edits the Our World In Data website. On that site, he argues at length that we can acknowledge those problems while still admitting progress has occurred and is continuing on many fronts.
In Roser’s now somewhat famous 2018 summation: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”
So after another year of scientific advance, governance improvement and economic development, here’s a brief stocktake of 2025 global happenings for which we should be grateful.
Richer and smarter
Progress on extreme poverty: The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty – that is, less than US$3 a day adjusted for inflation – hit another new low in 2025: 10.1%. Just 35 years ago, that same number was 43.4%.
If you ever wonder whether the world can make progress, this is a number to remember. In a third of a century, the world has cut its poverty rate by three-quarters. That’s largely due to improvements in southern and eastern Asian nations like China and India.
The result has been that even with population continuing to grow, the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty – at 831 million – was lower in 2025 than it has been at any time in the past 200 years.
Roser warns, however, that improvements will not continue much longer without progress in a group of mostly African countries. Here, populations are still growing fast but per-person growth has stagnated for decades.
Source: World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform; Our World in Data.
Soaring education: If the story of recent decades is falling poverty, the developing story is education. Illiteracy is falling worldwide. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are in the early stages of a massive expansion in post-secondary education, the education level most associated with breakthroughs in our understanding. Over the years to 2100, we will experience a huge infusion of new talent onto the world stage.
Source: Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
Peak human
Stabilising population: We are not doomed to suffer an ever-increasing population; indeed, global population growth is well past its peak. The global population, now just over 8 billion, is expected to peak sometime later this century at between 9 and 10.5 billion, and then slowly drop. Here’s an explanation from renowned Danish global health statistician Hans Rosling, who worked to spread this good news until his death in 2018:
Source: Hans Rosling
(Indeed, in the past few years we have seen a rise in worrying that human population will eventually decline too far. But given the complex forces that shape long-term human population, it seems a little early to worry about that.)
Scientific and medical breakthroughs
Triumph of the malaria vaccine: COVID killed an estimated 7 million people before vaccines brought it under control in 2022 and 2023. But vaccination’s greatest success has been against malaria. A scourge of the tropics for centuries, malaria has been killing more than 600,000 a year for more than four decades, with 95% of the damage concentrated in Africa.
An unheralded new malaria vaccine, rolled out from the start of 2024, began to show remarkable results in 2025. The World Health Organization certified the tropical nations of Suriname and Timor-Leste as malaria-free in 2025. If the malaria vaccine rollout continues to have the same success, it is expected to substantially cut child deaths and hospitalisations in the next half-decade.
Source: World Health Organization; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
The end of Eroom’s Law: Just a few years ago, the pharmaceutical industry was so worried about slow progress that researchers referred to “Eroom’s Law”. That’s the famous Moore’s Law of continual progress, from the IT industry – but in reverse, with slower and slower progress. Now breakthroughs in bioinformatics, genome editing tools and artificial intelligence are leading researchers to contemplate a re-acceleration of drug discovery and development, and the end of Eroom’s Law.
Source: Nature
Regenerative medicine: Researchers made significant strides toward human limb and organ regeneration. No, really: 2025 saw the publication of studies identifying a key enzyme in salamanders [DH1] called ambystoma mexicanum that regulates limb regrowth. This enzyme led to human trials of an implantable patch to reinforce the heart wall, offering a new potential treatment for heart failure.
Source: Nature
Cancer and bone treatment: In December 2025, chemists reported the first complete synthesis of verticillin A. This is a previously hard-to-create fungal compound with potent anticancer properties, particularly for aggressive brain tumours and cancers of the ovaries, breasts, colon and pancreas.
Source: Nature
Cleaner planet
Ozone recovery: The ozone hole over Antarctica was reported to have closed earlier in 2025 than in previous years. That continues a long-term trend of recovery that is due to global chemical bans made under an international agreement, the Montreal Protocol.
Source: EU Copernicus
Clean energy increases: Renewable energy continued to rise in 2025 as new solar cells and batteries kept growing cheaper and more efficient. Renewable sources are now projected to finally overtake coal as the world’s largest source of electricity generation in 2026. This shift is supported by the completion of non-renewable but equally low-carbon projects such as the UK’s £14 billion investment in the Sizewell C nuclear plant.
Source: International Energy Agency
Beyond the horizon
The return to the Moon: Amongst the keenly anticipated pieces of 2026 good news is the likely return of humans to deep space. In 2025, NASA successfully tested key systems for its Artemis missions. In 2026 it hopes to send four astronauts on a journey around the Moon, the first since 1972. That should pave the way for a return to the Moon’s surface starting in 2028.
Source: NASA
Technicians assemble an optical communications system for NASA’s planned 2026 Artemis mission.
So enjoy your holiday. 2025 has offered much to be grateful for; the odds are that 2026 will offer more.
