Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? Celebrating Five Years of Progress
The world has changed big-time since our launch.
Emma Varvaloucas
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Celebrating Five Years of Progress
The Progress Network turns five this week. When we launched the organization, in October 2020, it was into a totally different world than the one we find ourselves in now. At the time, we were in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic; not two months later, a British retiree would be the first to be vaccinated in a global campaign that saved nearly 20 million lives in its first year. Less than two years later, the World Health Organization was eyeing the official end to the pandemic. Today, not only have many of the economic issues that defined that period—inflation, supply chain issues—been settled, development indicators are back on track and new technological avenues have opened up.
So much else has happened since then: conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine (the latter now ended?), Donald Trump’s return to the White House, an mpox outbreak that came and went, and the biggest election year in world history. There has been much to applaud as well. Here’s our list of the biggest and best developments since The Progress Network launched, many of which we couldn’t have even imagined five years ago.
AI Everything
Artificial intelligence went from hypothetical to ubiquitous. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022, two years after the unveiling of its predecessor, GPT-3, The Guardian wrote that “professors, programmers, and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years.”
Not quite, although AI might be at once propping up the American economy and wreaking havoc on college grads. Back then, we were astonished by its abilities; now, we’re dealing with its “sloppy” consequences even as we cheer on its scientific applications, including aiding doctors, better predicting the weather, and enabling historical discoveries.
Vaccines on a 5-Year Run
RFK Jr. notwithstanding, there has been so much amazing news around vaccines that there’s not enough space to include it all. A new highly efficacious malaria vaccine was announced and has already been distributed to millions of children in Africa; its rollout in Asia just began last month in Bangladesh. Back-to-back Ebola vaccines have essentially ended the era of large outbreaks. And studies released in England and the United States have pointed to a future in which cervical cancer might be wiped off the planet.
The past half decade also brought the first vaccine against RSV and heaps of progress around mRNA vaccine trials, including for cancer. The technology is also being tested to combat HIV. (Lenacapavir, an injection with nearly 100% protection against HIV, was also approved in 2022.)
Gene-Editing Cures
In the fall of 2023, the United Kingdom became the first country to approve a treatment that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR, for the blood diseases sickle cell and beta-thalassaemia. Bahrain and the US followed quickly after.
In 2025, a seven-month-old with a rare disease received a CRISPR-aided treatment developed especially for him; it was a first, and it worked! The tool now buoys “cure talk” around a variety of other rare diseases.
Space Age 2.0
We may have entered a new space age. The James Webb Telescope is enabling us to see farther back in time, and the largest astronomical camera ever built is now snapping pics of the night sky from a mountaintop in Chile. These years have also welcomed the first sample brought back from deep space, the best signs we’ve had so far of past life on Mars, and the creation of Africa’s first space agency. In 2022, NASA demonstrated that it could knock an asteroid off course, which is a good thing to have in our global back pocket.
Meanwhile, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic have been expanding possibilities for private space companies and space tourism, with the first all-civilian spaceflights and spacewalk.
Other Notables
It seems like an overstatement to say that there has been a clean energy transformation since 2020, with global emissions still (slowly) rising, but certainly, a lot has changed there, too. Recently, renewables overtook coal power for the first time; China released its first emissions reduction targets; and EVs, heat pumps, and solar panels are winning over even unlikely parts of the world.
There has also been lots of slow-moving progress on access to electricity, sanitation systems and clean water, social protections, and financial accounts, as well as the continued downturn of child marriage, child labor, and extreme poverty. Since 2020, 17 countries have legalized either civil unions or same-sex marriage.
All in all, not bad for a mere five years.