Hi everyone,
Two quick bits of news from FC HQ for you this week. The first is that we've been invited to speak at TED in Vancouver this year, where we're going to be sharing the news of the last year, Future Crunch style. It's a great opportunity and we're honoured (and still slightly shocked) to have been asked. Work is already underway on a plan to outdress Machine Dazzle.
The second bit of news is that after one too many typos, we've found a copy editor in the form of one of our subscribers, Steph C. Not only has she got an uncanny ability to find even the smallest of errors, she's also incredibly generous, and has offered to donate her fee to the charities we support here. A heartfelt thank you Steph, and welcome to the team.
Without further ado, here is some...
Good news you probably didn't hear about
Did you know that the world malaria map is shrinking? Since the turn of this century, 25 countries, home to more than a billion people, have eradicated the disease. Six of those countries (China, El Salvador, Malaysia, Iran, Belize and Cabo Verde) have achieved the feat since 2019, and the next three to join the list will be Nepal, Bhutan and Saudi Arabia. WHO
European cancer mortality predictions for 2023 suggest death rates will be 6.5% lower in men and 3.7% lower in women than they were in 2018. The biggest contributor to this decline is lung cancer, whose mortality rates are estimated to fall by up to 36% among those aged 25 to 64 years. Between 1989 and 2023, more than 5.8 million cancer deaths have been avoided in the EU.
India conducted the largest and most effective vaccination campaign by a single country during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report by Stanford University estimates it saved 3.4 million lives and prevented $18.3 billion of economic losses - a timely reminder that the news tells us about what goes wrong, and hardly ever tells us about what goes right.
Some good news from East Africa. Child mortality in Kenya declined by 22% between 2014 and 2022, and by 36% in Tanzania between 2015 and 2021. Uganda is also reporting a 37% decline in annual HIV/AIDS-related deaths between 2016 and 2021, thanks to antiretroviral therapies and changing sexual behaviours.
India has been transformed by digital payments. Close to 300 million individuals and 50 million merchants now use phones for even the smallest of transactions - 10 cents for a cup of chai or $2 for a bag of vegetables. The shift has revolutionized Indian commerce, making business easier and bringing tens of millions into the formal economy. NYT
107 countries around the world now provide paid parental leave for fathers. Back in the 1990s, only 46 countries had a paid leave policies for fathers, largely high-income nations. "There is widespread recognition that we don't solve gender equality without dads getting leave." Axios
The United Kingdom has overtaken Canada, Germany and Australia to become one of the world’s most socially liberal nations towards divorce and abortion. “What were once pressing moral concerns – things like homosexuality, divorce and casual sex – have become simple facts of life for much of the public.” Guardian
Reproductive rights activists in Honduras are celebrating after Honduran President Xiomara Castro signed an executive order ending a ban on the morning after pill. Honduras, a heavily Catholic nation, banned the use and sale of the emergency contraception in 2009, arguing it would cause abortions. Reuters
It looks like the United States might have turned the corner on one of its biggest social and health problems - drug overdoses. Recent data from the CDC is showing a sustained dip in overdose deaths as of September 2022, down 7.2% from the peak reached in February 2022. Its still too early to celebrate, but it's the first bit of good news we've seen on this issue in a long time.
The proportion of smokers in Cambodia fell from 16.6% in 2014 to 13.04% in 2021, a decline of around one-fifth. It's good news: tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and untimely death in Cambodia. Attitudes are also changing, with 95% of people supporting an increase in cigarette taxes and the price of tobacco products. Ghana News
As predicted, following Eli Lilly's cut to insulin prices last week, Novo Nordisk now says it will cut its prices by 75%. Experts expect the third top insulin maker in the United States, Sanofi, to follow suit. Before this, insulin prices were five to ten times higher in the US than in other high-income countries. Ars Technica
Construction work in the United States has become a lot safer in the last few generations. Between 1970 and 2023, the occupational death rate in construction declined from around 70 per 100,000 workers to 15 per 100,000 workers, a fall of almost 80%, and during the same period the injury rate declined seven-fold. Construction Physics
Amidst the horrors of the war in Ukraine, one of the rare bright spots has been a dramatic shift in attitudes towards the LGBTQ community. Queer people have achieved unprecedented visibility in the country's fight to preserve its sovereignty, and public opinion has rapidly grown more supportive of reforms to fully recognize their rights as citizens. Politico
If it bleeds it leads
Remember how subway crime in New York was front page news in America last year? Well, the NYPD has done a good job at getting a handle on it. Major crimes fell by 9.1% in February, part of a larger 19.4% decline so far in 2023. The overall number of people being victimized has decreased by a fifth, shaking out to around five crimes per day among some 3 million riders.
Anyway, here's a nice bit of local news celebrating that achievement... oh, hold on.
The only home we've ever known
In the last three months humanity has made some big strides towards protecting life on Planet Earth. Following COP15 in December and the High Seas treaty last week, and with UN negotiations on plastics pollution in progress, countries finally have a clear action plan to deal with the three planetary crises of our time: the climate emergency, biodiversity loss and pollution. Guardian
Politicians are catching up with much of the public on this. Because people – and particularly young people and Indigenous people – see what is happening and they see what their future will be like without taking these actions.
David Cooper, Acting Biodiversity Chief, United Nations
Seaweed is having a moment. A recent study found that substituting 10% of diets with seaweed by 2050 would free up 110 million hectares of agricultural land, while only using 0.03% of the ocean’s surface. Seaweed farms, which have a long history in Asia, also eliminate the need for fresh water, pesticides, and fertilizers. Hakai
Debt-for-climate swaps, which allow countries to reduce their debt obligations for conservation, are taking off, and new research shows they could generate over $100 billion for environmental action in low-income countries. While the concept has been kicking around since the 1980s, recent deals for Barbados, Belize and the Seychelles show that it’s going from strength to strength. Energy Monitor
The Vjosa River in Albania, home to more than 1,000 animal and plant species, has been declared a national park. For years, its fragile ecosystem was under threat: at one point as many as 45 hydro projects were planned across its length. But earlier this week, after a decade-long campaign by environmentalists, it was declared the first wild river national park in Europe. Guardian
The Biden administration has finalized a rule forcing factories and power plants in 23 Western and Midwestern states to sharply cut smog-causing pollution that is released from their smokestacks and fouls the air in Eastern states. The rule should help cut nitrogen oxide pollution between March and November by half by 2027. NYT
New research has found that levels of air pollution in the Great Lakes region in the United States has decreased thanks to the elimination of three toxic insecticides: lindane, ɑ-HCH and endosulfan. The good news is mostly owed to regulatory action taken decades ago. EHN
Forest certification is slowly gaining ground in central Africa. Nearly 6 million hectares are now certified under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or the Pan-African Forest Certification (PAFC) standard: 2,989,168 hectares in Congo, 2,535,880 hectares in Gabon, and 341,708 hectares in Cameroon. Both schemes are recognised by the Fair & Precious initiative.
The final horn has sounded for one of Scotland’s oldest fox hunts, with new animal rights legislation ending 252 years of the cruel tradition. The Hunting with Dogs bill, which was passed in January 2023 and came into effect last week, outlaws hunting and killing wild mammals using packs of dogs. CNN
The population of whooper swans in the UK is predicted to double by 2030 thanks to conservation measures. Researchers analysed 30 years of data on over 10,000 wild swans and found survival rates were significantly higher in nature reserves, and that this is spilling over into other populations. "The big message is that nature reserves can operate as very good protectors of wildlife." BBC
Gave a damn
Some news from one of our charity partners SOLA (School of Leadership Afghanistan), who we donated to last year. This month the all-girls school, currently based in Rwanda, welcomed its first intake of students relocated from countries outside Afghanistan. It's thanks to an agreement with the International Organisation for Migration.
March 2023 marks one year since the Taliban closed the doors of girls’ schools in Afghanistan, denying Afghan girls the right to study past 6th grade. It is incredibly meaningful to me that they are now arriving in Rwanda to pursue their education, and I am endlessly grateful to IOM for helping facilitate their safe travel to our school where they will grow to become members of a generation of leaders who one day will help rebuild Afghanistan.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh, Founder, SOLA
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
The next time someone tells you we're not going to make it, just remember this. And if that doesn't work, then you might want to consider this excellent reframe, from Rebecca Solnit in the Washington Post.
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
Goldman Sachs is predicting that China will install nearly three times more clean energy by 2030 than its current target. Analysts are saying that solar and wind capacity will reach 3,300 GW by 2030, well ahead of the government’s current target of 1,200 GW. Bloomberg
According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the United States is on track to generate 80% of its electricity without burning fossil fuels by 2030. That's more than double today’s share, and would make America’s grid one of the cleanest in the world, with emissions 84% below 2005 levels, when carbon pollution was at an all-time high. Heatmap
Can't be done? It already has been, in the UK. In 2008, four-fifths of electricity came from fossil fuels. Since then, the country has cleaned up its electricity mix faster than any other major world economy. Coal-fired power has virtually disappeared, gas use is down by a quarter, and more than half of electricity now comes from solar, wind and nuclear. Carbon Brief
Demand for fossil gas in the EU fell by 55 bcm in 2022, or 13%, its steepest drop in history. That's equivalent to the amount needed to supply over 40 million homes. As a result, total global emissions from fossil gas fell by 115 million tons last year, with the EU accounting for more than 100 million tons of this reduction. IEA
In some healthy transatlantic competition, the EU is considering increasing its climate ambitions in response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. "Like in any race it’s now on us Europeans to be on the winning side.” The continent's leaders have also agreed to push for the global phaseout of fossil fuels at COP28 in November.
Latin America is poised to become a major renewable energy producer, with more than 319 GW of utility-scale solar and wind projects due to be launched by 2030 - equivalent to about 70% of the region's total current capacity from all sources combined. France24
A $6.3 billion package announced by the US government marks the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in American history. The package will target energy-intensive industries, including iron, steel, cement and concrete, by awarding grants to projects that cut emissions. “Today’s announcement is yet another exciting step in the race to decarbonize our heavy industries."
New research has calculated that covering 30% of the surface of 115,000 reservoirs around the world with floating solar would generate enough to power over 6,200 cities. An additional upside: many reservoirs already have electrical infrastructure because of hydropower, and the prevented evaporation would save enough water to supply 300 million people per year. Wired
As global supply chains start returning to some semblance of normality, it’s becoming clearer that sales of new internal combustion vehicles are unlikely ever to return to pre-pandemic levels. Analysts think overall numbers of ICE vehicles in the world will remain relatively steady for the next three years before starting to plummet in earnest from 2026 onward. Bloomberg
It's not hard to see why. At the top we have Volkswagen's new ID 2all, which costs just $27,000, has 450 km of range, and is as spacious as a Golf. In the middle is the new XPeng P7i, a $36,000 EV with 702 km of range, super-fast charging and a self-driving system that leaves Tesla's in the dust. And below is Scania's new 66-ton electric limestone hauler.
Indistinguishable from magic
Yes, we know Chat GPT-4 is out. There's been plenty of coverage everywhere else, so we're not going to add to it. Instead, check out what's happened in the world of Go, after AI beat the world's best player back in 2016. The game has undergone its biggest leap forward in generations, as human players have responded with novel strategies and approaches. Scientific American
The findings offer a hopeful perspective on the potential for AI to be an ally rather than a potential enemy in our journey towards progress and betterment.
Minkyu Shin, Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong
Car engines, medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and even a whole street of houses. Is the promise of additive manufacturing finally coming true? While home usage of 3D printers never took off, the technology has been stealthily making inroads into our lives in other ways, and there is growing evidence that the hype, this time round, might not be overstated. Guardian
If you don’t believe humans will have robot companions one day, then this bunny robot from Disney should change your mind. If you don't think we're going to have robot helpers in our houses, then have a look at Google's new kitchen assistant. And if you don't think robots can connect us with the divine, well then these temple robots in India might make you think again.
Researchers in Minnesota have developed the glowscope - a $50 device that turns a smartphone into a fluorescence microscope capable of imaging down to a resolution of 10 microns, the size of an average bacterium. Normally fluorescence microscopes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are found only in the best-funded labs. This could put them in the hands of students everywhere. Nature
Lab-grown meat is coming. But lab-grown dairy has already arrived. "Precision dairy" is produced by microbes in a lab, rather than cows, and is made of exactly the same molecules. It's free from cholesterol, lactose, growth hormones and antibiotics, and it might make a significant reduction in our impact on the environment — with fewer regulatory hurdles to clear. Washington Post
At a recent summit on genome editing, a Japanese scientist unveiled the first ever mammal born from two fathers — a mouse, created by generating eggs from male cells. The breakthrough opens up extraordinary possibilities for fertility treatments: the scientist behind it predicts that it will be technically possible to create a viable human egg from a male skin cell within a decade. Guardian
After 12 years, scientists at Cambridge have unveiled the most complex ever connectome: a complete wiring diagram of the 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses of a fruit fly's brain. It was done by capturing electron microscope images, stitching them together in a computer, and then finding the connections between each cell. An absolutely incredible piece of science. Science News
Humankind
The way of water
Meet Gidon Bromberg, a 60-year-old Israeli environmental lawyer who is the driving force of EcoPeace, the organisation behind last year's landmark agreement between Israel and Jordan to save the Jordan River.
Gidon was born in Israel, and his family moved to Australia when he was 3 years old. He credits growing up in the multicultural suburb of Elsternwick in Melbourne with sowing the seeds of his peace-building skills. At the age of 11, he returned to Israel on a family holiday and was so enchanted by the country’s energy that he vowed to live there one day.
As a teenager, Gidon decided he wanted to contribute to the peace process in the Middle East. Although he did take part in the protests to save the Franklin River in Tasmania one summer, environmental activism was not on his radar. After graduating university, he moved to Israel to work as a human rights lawyer, but when there were no jobs available, he changed paths and became the first voluntary staff attorney with the Israel Union of Environmental Defence.
In 1993 he started a master's degree in environmental law in Washington and during his studies became concerned that peace in the Middle East could destroy the environment. Governments were focused on the economic development of highways and hotels, without considering the environmental impact.
Determined to put sustainability at the heart of the peace process, Gidon returned to Israel and rallied a group of environmentalists from Jordan, Israel, and Palestine to create a common vision around their shared ecosystem. The organisation became known as EcoPeace.
When peace negotiations in the Middle East fell apart in the late nineties, the organisation shifted focus to how the renewed conflict was polluting shared environmental resources, particularly waterways. In early 2001, the Good Water Neighbours project was launched, with 28 cross-border communities from Palestine, Israel, and Jordan committing to work together on saving the Jordan River. In November 2022, this community-led initiative resulted in the Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
We don't need to be best friends; we need to just understand that our destiny is completely entwined through the common natural resources we share.
The information highway is still super
The overpopulation story is old, visceral and hard to refute. It might be time to change it. Did you know that more than 2.1 billion people — a quarter of humanity — now live in countries that are smaller each evening than they were in the morning? Paul Constance says we really need to start talking about global depopulation. Unfortunately, to do so is tantamount to heresy, on both the left and the right. Long Now
How about these three for strange bedfellows? Bernie Sanders, Martin Wolf and Kate Raworth in a discussion about whether democracy and capitalism are natural allies, or mutually incompatible; and whether capitalism is even a good way of organising society in the first place. Naturally, it's on the BBC, which does this kind of thing way better than the podcast bros.
A treat for the John Lanchester fan club (among whom we include ourselves), and the best thing you're going to read on the topic of microchips, "some of the most extraordinary objects humanity has ever made." Buckle up, it's a long one, but by the end you'll have a much better handle on one of the key geopolitical and technological issues of our time. LRB
Ryu Spaeth, an editor at New York magazine, on the fantasy of Ursula Le Guin. In an age where the big studios have taken over the enchantment business, Earthsea offers a throwback to a different kind of fantasy, where the mission to discover oneself is what the story is about. "To apprehend the fullness of a moment is to gain a heightened, almost heart-breaking awareness of ourselves." New Republic
That's it, thanks for reading, we'll see you next week.
With love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the team
