The Good News You Probably Missed in 2025

If you judged 2025 by its headlines alone, you would think the world spent twelve months in permanent freefall. Conflict. Climate dread. Economic unease. The exhausted feeling of being permanently online. But headlines are not a census of reality. They are a measurement of urgency.

Under the noise, 2025 was quietly stacked with progress. Not the cinematic kind that arrives with a trumpet fanfare. The slow, structural kind that changes the odds of a better future, then slips past the algorithm because it does not trigger outrage.

This is not an argument for optimism as denial. It is an argument for optimism as literacy. Here is the good news you probably missed, backed by real data, and what it reveals about where humanity is actually going.

1) The energy transition stopped being theoretical

The most consequential climate story of 2025 was not a speech, a pledge, or a summit moment. It was arithmetic.

Across major economies, renewable energy kept accelerating, pushed by brutally simple incentives: cheaper modules, faster deployment, and public appetite for clean power that does not make your lungs feel like a betrayal.

The International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2025 outlook projects global renewable power capacity will rise by almost 4,600 GW between 2025 and 2030, which is roughly equal to the combined installed power capacity of China, the European Union, and Japan. It also forecasts that solar will represent nearly 80% of worldwide renewable electricity capacity expansion in that period. 

That is not a niche trend. That is infrastructure being rewritten.

There is also an important psychological shift embedded in this. Climate coverage often frames the future as a choice between sacrifice and survival. The data is starting to tell a different story: the transition is increasingly propelled by normal human behaviours like cost-saving, convenience, and a desire for stability. When change becomes the default option, it stops requiring heroism.

Even IRENA’s tracking of the COP28 goal to triple renewables reads like a pragmatic playbook rather than a fantasy. It spells out the scale still required, including annual additions needed from 2025 onward and the investment gap, but the tone is clear: this is an engineering and finance problem now, not a science fiction problem. 

The cultural takeaway is understated but profound. For the first time in a long time, the “what” of decarbonisation is less mysterious than the “how fast.” That matters because speed is solvable. Mysticism is not.

2) Malaria prevention and treatment took a leap forward

A decade from now, we might look back at 2025 as the year malaria began to lose its grip, not because the threat vanished, but because the tools got stronger and more scalable.

By the end of 2025, the World Health Organization says more than 10 million children are targeted annually for malaria vaccination through immunisation programmes across 24 countries in Africa. 

The numbers are not abstract. They represent millions of families for whom a rainy season does not have to feel like Russian roulette.

WHO also summarises the evidence base in plain terms: both RTS,S and R21 malaria vaccines have shown they can reduce malaria cases by more than 50% during the first year after vaccination, and when delivered seasonally alongside seasonal malaria chemoprevention, they can prevent around 75% of malaria episodes in highly seasonal transmission settings. 

And 2025 was not only about prevention. It was also about treatment innovation.

In November 2025, Novartis announced Phase III results for a next-generation antimalarial combination (KLU156, ganaplacide/lumefantrine, also referred to as GanLum). In their release, the company reports a PCR-corrected cure rate of 97.4% under one analysis framework, equating to 99.2% in per-protocol analysis, and notes the drug’s potential value against resistant parasites. 

Here is why this belongs in a cultural editorial, not just a health bulletin.

Malaria has always been more than a disease. It is a map of inequality. It thrives where infrastructure is thin, where healthcare systems are stretched, where childhood is shaped by preventable risk. When prevention scales and treatment improves, it is not only biology that changes. It is the emotional architecture of daily life.

Progress looks like fewer funerals. But it also looks like fewer parents living in permanent vigilance.

3) Gene editing moved closer to being normal medicine

In 2025, gene editing continued its shift from breakthrough headline to clinical reality. In the UK, one announcement captured the direction of travel: the NHS expanded access to a gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease, describing it as offering the prospect of a cure. 

The deeper significance is what this represents: a medical future where we stop only managing symptoms and start correcting underlying biological causes. It is also a future where the most advanced science does not belong exclusively to the wealthy, at least not by design.

This is not to pretend the path is simple. Gene therapies remain expensive, complex to deliver, and politically contentious in how they get funded. But in 2025, the cultural signal was clear: the frontier is no longer speculative. It is in hospitals.

There is a subtle optimism hidden here. When a technology becomes healthcare, it stops being a fantasy. It becomes a policy question. And policy questions, however messy, are the kinds of questions societies can actually answer.

4) Cancer detection got more ambitious, and more measurable

One of the strangest features of modern life is that we can send a rover to Mars, but we still often catch cancer late.

In 2025, multi-cancer early detection blood tests continued to gather real-world evidence at scale. GRAIL’s PATHFINDER 2 results, for example, reported that the Galleri test detected a cancer signal in 0.93% of participants, with cancer diagnosed in 0.57%, and a positive predictive value of 61.6%. 

If you have learned to distrust anything that feels too neat, that instinct is wise. This is still a fast-evolving area. In the UK, Cancer Research UK is explicit that the NHS Galleri screening trial’s results are expected in 2026, and that the test is not perfect and can produce wrong results that may cause anxiety and lead to additional tests. 

But even with those caveats, the optimism is rational: we are moving toward a world where “early detection” is not a slogan but an operating system. And that shifts culture in unexpected ways. When detection improves, fear changes shape. Some dread becomes manageable. Some uncertainty becomes actionable. That is not just a medical win. It is a psychological one.

5) Fusion hit a new milestone, quietly raising the ceiling

Fusion has always been the technology of the future, and the joke is that it always will be. In 2025, the joke got a little less comfortable.

According to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, an experiment on April 7, 2025 achieved a fusion yield of 8.6 MJ (with stated measurement uncertainty), from 2.08 MJ of laser energy delivered to the target, producing a target gain of 4.13. 

No, this does not mean your electricity bill will be fusion-powered next year. Fusion remains hard, expensive, and full of engineering constraints.

But there is still something culturally important about it.

Fusion is a symbol of long-term thinking in an era that punishes it. A civilisation that keeps funding decade-spanning research projects is quietly voting for a future. The breakthrough is not only the physics. It is that the commitment endured long enough to produce results.

6) We got better at finding solutions faster

Some of the most optimistic science stories are not about a single miracle cure. They are about speed. How fast we can search. How quickly we can test. How efficiently we can discover.

In late 2025, researchers at the University of York described using robotics to synthesise and screen over 700 complex metal compounds in one week, identifying a promising antibiotic candidate in the process. 

This matters because antibiotic resistance is one of the most quietly terrifying threats of our time. The better story, and the one worth telling in 2026, is that the scientific workflow itself is evolving. Robotics, automation, and better computation are changing discovery from artisanal to scalable.

When the process improves, optimism stops relying on luck.

So what does this “good news” actually mean

A cynical reading of optimism says it is a coping mechanism. A sentimental story we tell ourselves so we can sleep.

A more honest reading is that optimism is a discipline: the refusal to let the loudest information become the only information.

Look at the pattern across these 2025 wins:

• Cleaner energy scaled because it got cheaper and easier to deploy.  
• Malaria prevention expanded because systems coordinated delivery, not because of one magical invention.  
• Gene editing edged toward normal healthcare because institutions made access a public question.  
• Cancer detection improved because trials measured performance in real people, then openly debated limitations.  
• Fusion advanced because long-term research was allowed to keep breathing.  
• Antibiotic discovery sped up because the tools got smarter, not because the problems got easier.  

The story of 2025, when you step away from the doom scroll, is not that everything is fine. It is that progress is happening in the places where humans build systems: energy grids, immunisation programmes, hospitals, laboratories, research institutions.

The cultural question is whether we have the attention span to notice. Because if 2025 taught us anything, it is this: the future is being built while we argue about the present.

Sources & Further Reading

• International Energy Agency, Renewables 2025 report and executive summary, on projected global renewable capacity growth and the accelerating dominance of solar power.

• International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), analysis of progress toward the COP28 commitment to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.

• World Health Organization, World Malaria Report 2025 and associated vaccine rollout briefings, detailing the scale and impact of RTS,S and R21 malaria vaccination programmes across Africa.

• Novartis, Phase III clinical trial results for ganaplacide–lumefantrine (GanLum), a next-generation antimalarial treatment designed to combat drug-resistant malaria strains.

• NHS England, announcement on expanded access to gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease, marking a major step toward curative genetic medicine within public healthcare.

• GRAIL, PATHFINDER 2 study results on the Galleri multi-cancer early detection blood test, alongside ongoing evaluation through the NHS-Galleri trial in the UK.

• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Ignition Facility updates on April 2025 fusion ignition experiments achieving record target energy gain.

• University of York and collaborating institutions, research on robotic and automated chemistry platforms accelerating antibiotic discovery and compound screening.