A great deal of good news for 2024
We need to face immense challenges head-on, the best is possible.
But we must not despair, we must look at the lights and smiles that light the way, and use them to move forward.
A treaty has been signed by some 70 countries to protect the high seas, from 2025, from excessive incursion by deep-sea fishing, deep-sea exploration and shipping. When it is ratified, the number of protected high seas will rise from 1% to 30%. Negotiations on another treaty to reduce plastic pollution are well advanced and should be finalized in 2025, imposing globally binding measures. This treaty is essential when you consider the figures: of the 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced, some 14 million tonnes are dumped in the oceans every year.
Firstly, in the field of artificial intelligence (or rather, “automatic forecasting”), dazzling progress has considerably improved the ability to predict breakdowns, accidents, leaks and errors, dramatically improving the efficiency and safety of machines and paving the way for huge savings in energy and raw materials.
In healthcare, increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence models have this year enabled: drastically improved prediction of the risk of heart attacks; considerable progress, particularly in Paris, in coronary treatments; the emergence of new drugs using messenger RNA in a wide range of fields, especially cancerology; considerable improvements in the first treatments for Parkinson’s disease; the first complete eye transplant performed by surgeons in New York, using donor stem cells; to cure children suffering from a particularly rare form of deafness thanks to a gene therapy acting on the optic nerve, developed both in China and in Cambridge in Great Britain; to repair, for the first time, a very particular vein whose deviation could cause irreversible damage to the brain after birth via in utero brain surgery in Boston, London and Toronto.
Tremendous progress has been made in eliminating the most harmful of some 4,700 perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl compounds. Known as PFAS, these chemical compounds are found in the sea, rainwater, drinking water, packaging and foodstuffs containing artificial sugars and preservatives. Considerable progress has also been made towards batteries that are less polluting, and less harmful to those who produce them, in particular by replacing lithium with sodium.
2023 will be remembered as the year of barbarity, war and the retreat of the rule of law.
A gloomy atmosphere reigns on the planet, and many deduce that much worse lies ahead. And yet, alongside all these disasters, a great deal of good news is coming in 2024.
What do you think?