Searching for hope in a tough year

This is the season when I customarily argue that the year just ending has been the best in human history.

So I dutifully sat at my laptop and tried to write something along the lines of: Sure, democracy is eroding, politics are toxic, wars are raging, America is losing allies, the planet is burning, and young people will never afford homes. But other than that ... I’ve done these “best year ever” columns annually, irritating Eeyores. But now I just can’t. The year 2025 was a setback for humanity — and unfortunately, the United States is a reason for the retreat.

Maybe the worst calamity to strike an adult is to lose a child. That has become increasingly rare, but in 2025, for the first time in this century, the number of children worldwide dying before the age of 5 is believed to have risen, by about 200,000, according to the Gates Foundation.

“That means more than 5,000 classrooms of children, gone before they ever learn to write their name or tie their shoes,” Bill Gates noted. Children are dying in increasing numbers in part because the Trump administration slashed humanitarian aid. I’ve been reporting around the world on the impact of the aid cuts, and I’ve seen too many children dying to write a “best year ever” column about 2025.

Yet perhaps because I’ve seen so many children suffering unnecessarily, I feel a need to read something reassuring — and it seems the only way I’ll read such a piece is if I write it. So here goes.

A starting point is to gain perspective and acknowledge that in the arc of human history, we’re still in good shape. While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000.

It also seems likely that the positive trajectories will resume after slippage in 2025 and 2026. The Gates Foundation forecasts that while the trend of declining child deaths will be slowed, deaths will at least drop in the coming years. Similarly, the share of children stunted by malnutrition will most likely be lower in 2030 than it is now, the foundation suggests, but perhaps not as low as if aid funding had been sustained.

Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 per cent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school — and those educated women transform families, economies and societies.

Despite the mess in the political world, some important trends are encouraging. Drug abuse has been one of the great scourges of modern times, with more than half a million Americans dying of overdoses since 2020 — but the worst may be over. While drug deaths are still far too high and not nearly enough is being done about them, incomplete statistics suggest that roughly 30 per cent fewer Americans will have died of overdoses in 2025 than in 2023.

Scientific breakthroughs also offer hope. A drug called lenacapavir is emerging as a more potent weapon to prevent HIV/AIDS; it can be taken by injection once every six months and virtually eliminates the risk of getting HIV.

Then there’s the gene editing tool CRISPR, which is revolutionising care for sickle cell anaemia and other diseases.

Scientists are studying how salamanders regenerate lost limbs and are making progress. They might eventually be able to grow you a new arm.

Another area that inspires me with its progress is clean energy. Climate change is still an enormous challenge, but energy economics have turned upside down and now offer a path forward — if we are willing to take it. My old college buddy Bill McKibben, who perhaps has done more than anyone else to raise alarms about climate change and who often as a result sounded rather bleak, is now surprisingly upbeat.

In his terrific new book, “Here Comes the Sun,” about the revolution of solar energy, Bill acknowledges all the challenges, but adds, “We’re also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history — something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity.” It took 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in 1954 to install the first terawatt of solar power on the planet, in 2022. It took two years to get the second.

This is because solar is increasingly cheap and simple — balcony solar systems are common in parts of Europe — and because batteries are making immense strides. Remember the line in “The Graduate” about the bright future to be found in “one word,” “plastics”? Today that one word might be “batteries.” Will the United States have the savvy to embrace these technologies and help avert a climate disaster? I don’t know. But a decade ago it was hard to see how we wouldn’t cook our planet, while now there’s a ray of hope.

So there you have it. This wasn’t the best year in human history. So much went wrong; so many lives lost needlessly, from the Gaza Strip to Sudan to Ukraine; so much betrayal of our own values here in America. But still, measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women’s rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years — plus we can glimpse a path forward that would leave Earth worth bequeathing to babies born today.

We all need a bit of reassurance. So take a nanosecond to commemorate our good fortune in living together in one of the best times ever to be a human being. Now, onward, so we can try to do better in 2026.

Nicholas D Kristof

The writer is an American journalist and political commentator