Dear humanity

Dear Humanity,

As 2025 draws to a close, I am writing to you simply as another human being among you, bewildered, implicated, and still, somehow, hopeful.

This year has been darker than most of us thought we could bear. And yet, we are still here. We have not stopped caring. That, in itself, is not a small thing.

The age of unbearable images

In 2025, war refused to leave the stage.

In Ukraine, missile and drone attacks intensified. The UN has recorded that in just the first half of this year, 6,754 civilians were killed or injured, a 54% increase over the same period in 2024, with July the deadliest month since the early phase of the full-scale invasion. Millions have been displaced, and the country now confronts the slow catastrophe of a collapsing population, birth rates sinking, villages emptied, futures postponed.

In Gaza, the war has passed from horror into something the human vocabulary struggles to name. By late November, the Palestinian death toll had exceeded 70,000, and UNICEF reports that more than 50,000 children there have been killed or injured since 2023 . Even after an October ceasefire, bombardment and siege continued in different forms, shattering any illusion that “ceasefire” necessarily means “safety.”

In June, for the first time in history, Israel and Iran fought an open, direct war –  missiles and airstrikes crossing borders in both directions, air defences overwhelmed, civilians killed in Beersheva and cities inside Iran . What had long been a shadow conflict tipped briefly into daylight and showed us what regional catastrophe would look like.

Beyond the headlines, Sudan’s civil war deepened into the world’s largest displacement crisis, with over 14 million people forced from their homes, and conflicts in Myanmar, the Sahel, and elsewhere added to the tally . By April, the UN refugee agency reported 122 million people forcibly displaced, roughly one in every 67 human beings on Earth.

We must begin by telling the truth –  this is a year in which our species inflicted extraordinary cruelty on itself.

Yet even here, in the furnace of human violence, there are embers of hope that we should neither sentimentalise nor ignore –

The world now sees. The same networks that carry disinformation also carry unbearable evidence –  grainy videos from a shelter hit in Odesa, a mother in Khan Younis holding her malnourished child at a UNICEF clinic, a Ukrainian nurse operating in a basement as the lights flicker . For all the lies, there is also unprecedented forensic witnessing. The distance between “us” and “them” has shrunk to the width of a screen.

The displaced are not only victims; they are agents. Refugees are organising mutual-aid cooperatives, founding businesses, running schools in camps, even as host countries struggle. And some policies, while harsh, are harsh partly because rich nations have failed to fund a humane alternative. Uganda’s painful decision this year to stop granting refugee status to Eritreans, Somalis, and Ethiopians was prompted by an aid collapse that cut its UNHCR funding by more than half .  Behind every cruel policy is a deeper choice the world has not yet made –  whether to treat displaced people as a permanent burden or as future citizens of a shared planet.

The longing for peace has not died. From student encampments demanding ceasefires to Israeli and Palestinian families meeting to grieve together, from Sudanese diaspora campaigns to Ukrainian volunteers repairing homes at the front, the most remarkable fact about 2025 is not that people fought, but that so many refused to accept war as normal.

Hope does not require us to look away from the bodies. It requires us to notice, alongside the bodies, the countless hands reaching out to lift them.

A year when the planet pushed back

If war is our oldest sin, climate breakdown is our newest.

In 2025, the Earth answered our emissions with a sequence of disasters that felt, at times, like a single continuous event.

Wildfires in Southern California in January and February killed dozens and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage, the most expensive climate disaster of the first half of the year.

In Tibet, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in January shook China, Nepal, and India, killing hundreds, followed in March by a 7.7 quake in central Myanmar that killed more than 5,000 and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.

A catastrophic flood in Mokwa, Nigeria in May left more than 500 dead and hundreds missing; monsoon floods in Pakistan in June killed over a thousand and affected nearly 7 million people.

Super Typhoon Ragasa barrelled through Taiwan, the Philippines, and southern China in September, triggering mass evacuations and widespread destruction.

In Australia, the 2025 Queensland floods, driven by stalled tropical low-pressure systems that dumped more than 300 mm of rain in 24 hours over parts of north Queensland, killed 33 people (including those who later died in a related melioidosis outbreak), forced mass evacuations along the coast, and caused more than A$1.2 billion in damage, ranking among the ten deadliest weather events of 2025 globally.

Meanwhile, the Middle East and North Africa experienced temperatures rising at twice the global average, with 2024 the region’s hottest year on record and prolonged spells above 50°C threatening basic human habitability.

We should not pretend this is “natural.” The physics are now brutally clear –  a warmer atmosphere holds more energy and more water, and that energy is arriving in people’s bedrooms as fire, flood, and fever.

And yet, paradoxically, 2025 was also a year when the infrastructure of hope became more visible.

At COP30 in Belém, on the edge of the Amazon, almost every country signed onto the “global mutirão”, a package of climate commitments that, while imperfect, marks a serious attempt to track progress on adaptation, food systems, and land use in a more consistent way.

Brazil used the summit to launch the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), designed to mobilise up to $125 billion to reward countries that keep their tropical forests standing, linking long-term finance to verified conservation outcomes. This is not charity; it is the beginnings of a new planetary contract between forest nations and the rest of the world.

The underlying energy system is shifting faster than our politics admit. In just the first half of 2025, renewables generated more electricity worldwide than coal for the first time on record: renewables supplied about 34.3% of global electricity (5,072 TWh), while coal fell to 33.1% (4,896 TWh). Solar and wind not only met all of the increase in global electricity demand; they slightly pushed fossil generation down overall.

The International Energy Agency now projects that between 2025 and 2030, we will add almost 4,600 GW of renewable capacity, roughly equal to the entire existing power capacity of China, the EU, and Japan combined.

In Australia, the transition stopped being theoretical and became measurable. In the first quarter of 2025, renewable energy supplied 43% of electricity on the National Electricity Market – a record share for any Q1 in the NEM’s 25-year history – and, for the first time, renewables ticked past 40% of the last 12 months’ supply on the main grid. At the same time, Australia released its first National Climate Risk Assessment and National Adaptation Plan, mapping 63 nationally significant climate risks across eight key systems and setting out how governments, business and communities will adapt in the decades ahead.

This is the strange duality of our moment –  we are living through both the failure and the success of climate action at once.

We have not yet chosen to end fossil fuel expansion, COP30 could not agree on a clear roadmap for a global phase-out . But we have already launched an energy transition that, if we choose to accelerate it, can still keep vast regions of the planet habitable.

Hope, here, is not a mood but a logistics problem –  how quickly we can translate physics and finance into protection for the most vulnerable.

The quiet courage of survival

In June, the World Bank did something deceptively simple but morally profound –  it raised the global extreme poverty line from $2.15 to $3 per person per day, using updated price data and national poverty lines. Overnight, on paper, 125 million more people were classified as living in extreme poverty.

The world did not suddenly become poorer that day; rather, we admitted that our previous threshold had been untruthful about what a minimally dignified life costs.

At the same time, the IMF’s October World Economic Outlook report projected that the global economy would still grow by about 3.2% in 2025, with emerging and developing economies growing just above 4% . Unemployment worldwide remains near a historic low of around 5%, according to the ILO, even as youth unemployment, informality, and gender gaps continue to undermine that apparent stability.

In Australia, poverty and precarity deepened beneath otherwise solid headline numbers. The ACOSS–UNSW Poverty in Australia 2025: Overview report, using 2022–23 HILDA data, found that 14.2% of people (3.7 million) and 15.6% of children (757,000) were living below the poverty line (50% of median household income after housing costs). The poverty rate rose from 12.4% in 2020–21 to 14.2% in 2022–23, meaning 593,000 more people were in poverty, including 134,000 additional children – largely due to the removal of COVID income supports and steep rent increases.

At the same time, Anglicare Australia’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot, which surveyed 51,238 rental listings, found that only 0.7% were affordable for a full-time minimum-wage worker, 0.3% for someone on the Age Pension, just 3 properties nationwide were affordable for a person on JobSeeker, and none at all for someone on Youth Allowance. Together, they show that even in a relatively wealthy country, the experience of 2025 for many was one of grinding precarity rather than prosperity.

We are therefore living through an odd combination –  macro-level resilience and micro-level precarity.

Tariffs are rising. Supply chains are fragmenting. But beneath the abstraction of “geoeconomics” are families checking fuel prices before driving their children to school, informal workers wondering if they will be replaced by software, farmers calculating whether the next flood will ruin the season entirely.

Where lies hope?

It lies, first, in the fact that we are finally starting to measure what matters more honestly – recognising higher poverty lines, reporting stalled human development rather than pretending that GDP growth alone is a moral achievement. The 2025 Human Development Report notes that global progress on the Human Development Index has largely stalled, with the smallest non-crisis-year increase since 1990, but it also argues that new development paths are possible if we harness AI and human agency together.

Second, hope lives in the everyday ingenuity with which people rebuild their lives in hostile systems –  young people juggling gig work while learning new skills; women running informal childcare networks in refugee camps; workers forming new unions in digital industries; communities experimenting with local currencies, mutual aid, and co-operatives.

These are not “feel-good” stories appended to a grim report. They are the seeds of a different economic order, one in which we finally measure prosperity by the security of the most vulnerable, not the comfort of the already safe.

Democracy, dignity, and the long backlash

Politically, 2025 felt like a hinge.

Donald Trump was inaugurated again on 20 January as the 47th president of the United States, beginning a second term defined by aggressive tariffs, symbolic culture-war gestures, and an explicit retreat from multilateral norms . Consequences have rippled far beyond U.S. borders –  from reshaped trade flows to deliberate snubs of longstanding partners, such as the decision not to invite South Africa to any G20 meetings during the U.S. presidency of the forum.

But the American story is only one strand in a wider pattern. The Global State of Democracy 2025 report concludes that more than half of all countries have declined in at least one key measure of democratic performance in the last five years. Judicial independence, press freedom, and electoral integrity are all under strain, and long-assumed democracies are no longer automatic anchors of stability.  Australia too has slipped down two places when it comes to rights.

Alongside democratic backsliding runs a coordinated assault on human rights, especially for LGBTQ+ people and migrants.

Russia extended its already draconian “LGBT propaganda” regime this year by banning the online game Roblox on those grounds, part of a broader crackdown that has labelled the international LGBTQ+ movement “extremist.”

In April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, “sex is binary,” a decision widely seen as narrowing protections for trans people.

New bans and restrictions on transgender service members and access to gender-affirming care have emerged in several countries, often justified with rhetoric that treats a tiny, vulnerable minority as a civilisational threat.

In Australia, 2025 exposed how our border policies collide with basic human dignity. In January, the UN Human Rights Committee handed down two landmark decisions finding that Australia was responsible for the arbitrary detention of asylum seekers, including unaccompanied minors, in offshore facilities on Nauru – even after many had been recognised as refugees.

The Committee ruled that Australia had violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by detaining them for years in harsh conditions and denying them an effective way to challenge their detention, stressing that a state “cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another State.” It called on Australia to provide compensation and to ensure such violations do not recur.

Refugees in other countries face similar hostility –  Uganda’s retreat from its once-model open-door refugee policy, under crushing funding cuts, is an ominous sign of how quickly generosity can erode when rich nations fail to share the load.

And yet even here, hope is not absent.

For every government narrowing the circle of belonging, there are networks of resistance widening it.

Lawyers bringing strategic cases to regional human-rights courts.

Municipalities declaring themselves “sanctuary cities” even when national politics turns hostile.

Grassroots movements, from queer youth groups to migrant worker unions, building solidarity across borders and identities the old ideologies never anticipated.

In Australia, coalitions of communities pushed back together. In November 2025, a coalition of 54 civil society organisations – including ACOSS, the Refugee Council of Australia, FECCA, the Settlement Council of Australia, SSI and the Community Council for Australia – issued a joint statement urging the federal government to fully fund and implement the National Anti-Racism Framework, arguing that “now is the moment to act, to build an Australia where everyone belongs, and where equality, dignity and justice are not aspirations but lived realities.”

The deeper truth is this –  the backlash is fierce precisely because the moral revolution of the last 50 years has been so successful. Women, queer people, racial and religious minorities, disabled people, Indigenous communities, all have claimed space that previous centuries denied them. Authoritarian and reactionary projects are trying to roll history back. They are, in that sense, confirmation that history has in fact moved.

Our task for 2026 is not just to defend “democracy” in the abstract, but to re-democratise democracy itself –  to make it worthy of the courage of those who have risked everything to vote, to protest, to speak.

AI, medicine, and the fragile miracle of knowledge

If 2025 was an age of cruelty, it was also an age of staggering scientific and public health progress.

This year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 79/325, creating an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance. For the first time, the world has agreed, however tentatively, that artificial intelligence is not just a commercial product or a military asset, but a public concern that requires global, science-based oversight.

The 2025 Human Development Report puts it starkly –  our future now depends less on what AI can do, and more on what we choose to do with it, whether we allow it to harden inequalities and surveillance, or use it to expand people’s real freedoms.

At the same time, in medicine, we have seen glimpses of a world where knowledge is translated directly into relief.

As of April, 19 African countries had integrated the RTS,S and R21 malaria vaccines into their childhood immunisation programs.

In November, Gavi and UNICEF announced a price cut that will allow nearly 7 million additional children to be protected from malaria by 2030.

By early 2025, the FDA had approved more than 30 cell and gene therapies, with dozens more expected by 2030, reshaping the outlook for people with rare diseases that were once a life sentence.

Australia approved donanemab (Kizunla), the first Alzheimer’s drug shown to significantly slow cognitive decline, even as researchers advance novel approaches like nasal-spray therapies to clear toxic proteins from the brain.

These are not miracles in the supernatural sense. They are the cumulative result of decades of patient work by scientists, clinicians, trial participants, regulators, and ordinary taxpayers funding public research.

And they carry a moral message –  human beings are capable of using intelligence, natural and artificial, to heal as well as to harm.

The question for 2026 and beyond is whether we will align our institutions with our breakthroughs.

Will AI systems be governed in ways that protect workers, patients, and citizens, or will they be deployed chiefly as tools of profit and control? Will gene therapies and advanced drugs become the entitlement of a planetary elite, or will they be distributed according to need? Will digital systems be used to track and punish, or to coordinate care and climate resilience?

These are not technical questions. They are ethical, political, civilisational.

Gratitude and a proposition for 2026

I promised you a letter of hope and thanks, not merely a ledger of wounds.

So let me say this clearly –  thank you, Humanity.

Thank you to the nurses in Gaza, in Kherson, in Mandalay, who kept working as shells fell and power failed.

Thank you to the fire crews in California and Izmir.

Thank you to the Pakistani and Nigerian villagers who pulled neighbours from floodwaters before the cameras arrived.

Thank you to the Sudanese mothers who walked for days to reach safety, and then organised childcare so other women could sleep.

Thank you to the teachers who re-opened schools in temporary shelters.

To the coders who released open-source tools for disaster prediction and language access.

To the local journalists who kept reporting under censorship and threat.

To the climate activists who were mocked for their idealism yet showed up at COP30 anyway.

To the health workers delivering malaria vaccines village by village .

You have made it harder, not impossible, but harder, for the rest of us to give up.

I want to propose that we treat 2026 not as a “fresh start,” but as a year of radical adulthood.

Adulthood means we no longer indulge in the fantasy that someone else, a leader, a billionaire, a technology, will solve this for us. It also means we refuse the equally childish temptation of nihilism.

So here is a simple, difficult covenant we might make with one another.

We will stop pretending we are innocent. Whether we live in war sones or far from them, in rich countries or poor, we exist inside systems that harm others. The point is not to wallow in guilt, but to understand that our choices, what we buy, what we vote for, what we tolerate, either reinforce those systems or help to transform them.

We will measure progress by protection. If the global economy grows, but extreme poverty (now more honestly defined) persists, we will call that what it is –  a failure of design. If AI makes some tasks easier but leaves democracy weaker and workers more precarious, we will not call that “innovation”; we will call it a misallocation of genius.

We will centre those who have suffered most. The world’s 122 million displaced people are not a side-story; they are the main characters of this century. So are the children of Gaza, the farmers of Sudan, the coastal families of Pakistan, the slum-dwellers of Lagos and Manila and São Paulo. If our plans for AI, for trade, for climate, for medicine, do not materially improve their lives, they are not serious.

We will treat technology as a tool, not a destiny. Resolution 79/325 and the new AI panel are important not because they will magically “govern AI,” but because they symbolise something overdue –  the insistence that technology must answer to the world, not the other way around.

We will consciously practice tenderness. This may sound small compared to geopolitical strategy or climate finance. It is not. The decision to speak to opponents without dehumanising them, to protect a minority even when it is politically costly, to comfort a frightened child, to treat migrants and queer people and religious others as fully human, these are the micro-choices that, in aggregate, determine whether we slide into fascism or build a liveable pluralism.

Humanity, you are capable of astonishing brutality. 2025 has shown that beyond any doubt.

But you are also capable of something rarer –  moral imagination.

You can imagine a Ukrainian reconstruction that avoids the mistakes of previous post-war orders and centres justice for the displaced.
You can imagine a Middle East where Palestinian safety and dignity are non-negotiable, and Jewish safety and dignity are non-negotiable, and any project that demands the sacrifice of either is rejected.

You can imagine an energy system that treats forests as priceless allies, not fuel stockpiles.

You can imagine an AI ecosystem that expands the capabilities of the poor more than the convenience of the already powerful.

As a species, we are now far too powerful to be merely clever. We must become wise.

Wisdom, in this context, might mean something like this:

To remember every statistic hides a face.

To accept that suffering anywhere is ultimately unsustainable everywhere.

To understand that the point of all our science, all our art, all our politics, is simple –  to make it easier for human beings, and the more-than-human world we inhabit, to flourish.

I will not offer you false comfort. 2026 will be hard. Some of the worst consequences of our past choices are still on their way. But I will offer you this conviction, born of both data and observation.

You have not yet exhausted your capacity to do good. You have not yet reached the limits of your empathy, your creativity, your solidarity. You have not yet told your best story.

I thus beseech us to enter 2026 not with naïve optimism, but with stubborn, disciplined hope, the kind that organises, votes, donates, builds, tends, and refuses to look away.

With gratitude, and with trust in the wiser, kinder version of us that is still emerging.