Hey everyone!

This week, the good news took us to India, Australia and Ghana. So like always we’ve got 3 positive developments that we want to share with you.

One is about India reaching a big climate goal years earlier than expected. Another is about a research programme in Australia that is giving people with advanced cancer options they simply didn’t have before. And the third is a massive win for Ghana in fighting Malaria.

Wish you a great start into the week!

When climate targets come up, large developing countries are usually portrayed as the ones lagging behind. Often, they’re the ones asked to make sacrifices while wealthier countries did the heavy lifting on climate. But India is pushing back on that framing, and their numbers back it up.

When India first signed the Paris Agreement, it promised that 40% of its installed power capacity would come from non fossil sources by 2030. India already achieved that goal in 2021, so 9 years earlier. As a result it raised the bar to 50%, and passed that again in mid 2025. Then, at the end of July this year, it crossed another line: more than 300 gigawatts of non fossil capacity, now around 55% of the entire grid.

Solar did most of the heavy lifting. In 2014, India had less than 3 GW of solar installed. Today it’s around 165 GW, almost 60 times more. Wind nearly tripled over the same period to 58 GW, with hydro, bioenergy and a bit of nuclear making up the rest. In the last financial year alone, India added a record 55 GW.

This development especially matters because of the scale involved. This is a country of more than 1.4 billion people, where electricity demand keeps climbing and coal was the cheapest answer for decades. But since solar panel prices fell and the government updated policies that changed.

One thing worth being clear about: capacity is what the grid could produce, not what it actually does. Renewables still generate only about 30% of India’s electricity, and new coal plants are still being built. But the momentum is definitely there.

For most of modern medicine, cancer treatment looked pretty similar for everyone: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. That works for a lot of people. But when a cancer is advanced, rare or simply stops responding, this approach sometimes doesn’t work effectively enough.

Scientists in Australia are working to change that. Since 2016, a national programme called MoST, short for Molecular Screening and Therapeutics, has been reading the DNA of tumours from patients whose standard treatment had stopped working. To keep it simple: every cancer is driven by specific genetic changes. If doctors can identify those changes, they can match the patient with a drug designed to target exactly those changes.

This year, the team published results from more than 3,300 of those patients in JAMA Oncology. Over a third had a genetic change with a well tested drug to match. Patients who received that matched drug lived a median of 21 months, compared with about 13 months for those on other treatments. For people who had already been through standard treatment, eight extra months is a lot of time.

To be honest, this was an observational study, so it shows a strong link rather than proof. And while many of them had a matching drug, only a small share actually received it, often because the right trial or approval wasn’t available.

Still, MoST has now screened more than 8,000 patients. And each patient adds to a growing body of evidence about which genetic mutations respond to which therapies. Over time, that knowledge makes the matching process more effective. The hope now is that the model is refined further and that access to this kind of genomic matching becomes available to more cancer patients, in Australia and even worldwide.

Malaria is one of the oldest diseases humans have ever had to deal with, and it’s still one of the deadliest. In 2024, it killed around 600,000 people, almost all of them in Africa and most of them young children. For decades, Ghana carried one of the heaviest malaria burdens in West Africa.

Which is why these next numbers are so important.

In 2011, Ghana’s health system recorded 3,259 malaria deaths. In 2025, it recorded 52. That’s a drop of 98%, announced by the Ghana Health Service on World Malaria Day.

There was no single miracle behind it. Ghana took tools that already existed and used them consistently, year after year: insecticide treated bed nets, spraying the inside walls of homes where mosquitoes rest, and preventive medicine for young children during the rainy season, when malaria peaks.

Then came vaccines. In 2019, Ghana became one of the first three countries in the world to give children a malaria vaccine, and later the first to approve a second, newer one called R21. Child malaria deaths have fallen by 76% in just the last three years.

It would be wrong to call malaria beaten, though. Ghana still records more than 5 million cases a year. What has changed is that far fewer people die from it. These are also recorded deaths, so some likely go uncounted. And with international aid shrinking, Ghana is setting up a national End Malaria Council to raise more of the money at home.

The next goal is fewer than 15 deaths a year by 2028, and wiping out malaria entirely in 21 districts of the capital, Accra. Going from thousands of deaths a year to a few dozen is the kind of progress that needs to make headlines, and that’s exactly why we wanted to feature it here.

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