The latest Fix the News edition gathers a set of mostly unreported progress stories, and their common thread is not optimism alone but measurement. The most consequential item is a new International Energy Agency report, Electrification, which argues that moving more of the economy onto electricity can strengthen energy security, support development, improve affordability and lower emissions at the same time.
The IEA notes that electricity supplies 23% of the world’s final energy today. It models a world in which that share reaches 35% by 2035, and says electric machines are efficient enough that electricity would then be doing more than half of the world’s useful work. The report attaches numbers: household energy bills fall by 15%, electrified transport avoids 18 million barrels of oil a day, fuel-importing countries save $400 billion a year, and about 240,000 fewer people die annually from dirty air.
The idea’s path has been building for years. The newsletter traces it from a 2009 Scientific American argument by Stanford engineer Mark Jacobson that the world could run on wind, water and sunlight, through Saul Griffith’s 2021 book Electrify, to the 2025 electrotech framing by Kingsmill Bond and Ember, which recast electrification around economics and security. On publication day, Türkiye, co-host of this year’s COP31 with Australia, launched a 35 by 35 pledge and called on other governments to sign up.
The health stories are similarly concrete. Meningitis caused an estimated 259,000 deaths in 2023, according to The Lancet, a figure down by a quarter since 2015 and by almost half since 2000, with the sharpest reductions in young children. In Africa’s meningitis belt, countries such as Sudan and Rwanda have cut death rates by more than 80% through vaccination and better surveillance. On maternal health, the UNFPA says it has helped deliver 41.7 million safer births since 2008, trained almost 900,000 midwives, and reached an estimated 4.7 million women across 44 countries in 2025 alone; maternal deaths in those countries have fallen 37% since 2010.
In Nigeria, the health minister says a national initiative has cut maternal deaths by 17% in the highest-burden areas by renovating 435 health facilities, hiring more than 15,000 community health workers and lifting primary healthcare visits from 10 million to 45 million a year. The country accounts for roughly 29% of the world’s maternal deaths.
Conservation news includes the identification of Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted cat that genome comparisons show split from its relatives around 1.4 million years ago; it is the first new feline species since 1923. Greater one-horned rhinos have reached a record 4,075 animals, with poaching down 86% since 2016 and zero rhino killings recorded in India, Nepal and Indonesia in 2025. Norway has designated its largest marine protected area, covering 1,848 square kilometres of coral reefs, sponge gardens and fish nurseries, while Vietnam has created a reserve for the Delacour’s langur.
China’s clean-air campaign has cut Beijing’s smog by 70% in a decade and reduced heavily polluted days from 58 a year to one. The effort has prevented an estimated 680,000 premature deaths since 2020 and generated $715 billion in cumulative health benefits. China has also finished phasing out ozone-depleting HCFCs from its solvent industry and, since 2021, has cut HFC-linked emissions by 759 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. A two-decade study of more than 1,100 children in New York found that memory and sensory skills improved fastest when local air pollution fell fastest.
Technological developments round out the edition. Waymo’s robotaxis have covered 220 million paid miles and show 92% fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes than human-driven cars; an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study found 68% fewer crashes overall. A converted Cessna Caravan flew itself 4,988 kilometres across North America, though regulations required a human on board. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August with a donated spy satellite mirror to map dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, and Chinese researchers built a 6 kg CT scanner small enough for field archaeology.
The edition also includes a reminder that some discoveries are still low-tech. Peruvian archaeologists cleared sand from a doorway at Chan Chan and found an undisturbed Chimu royal tomb: 38 bodies, some with red cinnabar pigment on the skull, alongside silver and copper jewellery, quartz beads and textiles. Migrants sent a record $729 billion in remittances to poorer countries in 2025, nearly twice the level of a decade ago. Fix the News is also directing A$20,000 to a nursing home in Ecuador run by the Dorothean Sisters.
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