New York: As 2022 comes to an end amid stubborn inflation, a “tripledemic”, a climate crisis and a brutal war with no end in sight, it can be difficult to remember that good things happened this year, too.

Coronavirus vaccines became available for children as young as six months old, a relief to parents as much of the world returned to a new normal. Rich countries agreed to do more to help poor nations cope with climate disasters. And major scientific breakthroughs brought us a tad closer to long-held ambitious such as nuclear fusion power and curing cancer.

Even as the world faces many challenges, there are reasons to be hopeful about 2023 and beyond, so we continue the tradition of highlighting the most promising developments of the year.

We’re a little closer to a new source of clean energy. After a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion this month, investors are pouring money into companies that want to harness the type of energy that powers the sun and stars. Fusion, if it could be deployed on a large scale, would offer a nearly limitless pollution-free energy source. But until this year, scientists had never created a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California finally reached that milestone this month. While it could still be decades before fusion becomes a practical power source, the accomplishment is a big step towards that goal.

Wall Street and venture capitalists are bullish on green tech, too. In his year-end letter, Bill Gates notes that climate-related research and development have grown nearly one-third since the 2015 Paris accords. Private capital investment in the sector is on the upswing too, with $US70 billion ($140 billion) spent over the past two years. From that, new technologies to address climate issues are continuing to emerge. At the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in November, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, predicted that venture funding would flow more into startups using hard science to tackle the planet’s biggest problems. “I believe we will be seeing a transformation of where the money goes,” Fink said. “It’s not going to go to all this stuff that provided us good utility to get food quicker or find a taxi sooner.”

Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears that technology will replace human workers are as old as technology, and they were raised once again in November when a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, an automated writing program. But AI experts have long insisted that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.

Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty in the US. The number of children living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 per cent since 1993. As the Times′ Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households”. The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families, and changes to welfare laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for assistance programs.

We’re getting closer to cancer vaccines. Researchers have long thought that it was possible to immunise individuals at high risk of cancer, or even cure cancer in those who were showing signs of it. Until recently, they had made little progress, but now promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors new hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in mid-stage trials. It and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.