The grand challenges of global health and development, from feeding a warming world to defeating antibiotic resistance, require funding and effort and politics. But they also require breakthroughs.

In the last hundred years, we’ve made incredible progress fighting malaria, invented game-changing vaccines, and developed new drugs that could change the course on heart disease. But that doesn’t mean we should be satisfied. There’s still plenty of work to be done, and it’s all the more important in light of the worldwide retreat of foreign aid.

This year’s class of innovators are the scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs who understand that real progress demands radical new tools. They’re engineering microbes to clean up pollution, resurrecting ancient antibiotics with the help of AI, and building entirely new platforms for vaccine production in the Global South. 

Their work is a vibrant proof point: the future of human well-being, the fight against pandemic threats, and the resilience of our food supply all depend on the creative, sometimes audacious, power of innovation. —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

César de la Fuente 

Every 15 minutes, one person in the US dies because of an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively. If you ever get an antibiotic-resistant infection, it could be César de la Fuente’s research that ends up saving your life.

De la Fuente heads a lab at the University of Pennsylvania called the Machine Biology Group, which is helping to pioneer the field of AI-based antibiotic discovery. His team developed the first computer-designed antibiotic with proven efficacy in preclinical animal models. 

You can thank this team for launching us into the brave new world of “molecular de-extinction”: In 2023, they resurrected molecules with antibiotic properties found in extinct organisms — Neanderthals. After training an AI model to make predictions about which molecules might make effective antibiotics for our modern age, they created those molecules in the lab and tested them in infected mice, with promising results.

Emboldened by this success, de la Fuente asked: “Why not just mine every extinct organism known to science?” To do that, the team developed a more powerful AI model called APEX, which they unveiled earlier this year. Already, it’s allowed them to identify new molecules in everything from ancient penguins to magnolia trees that had long since disappeared. 

This work is very cool — and very urgent. By 2050, 10 million people could die each year from diseases that have grown resistant to drugs. Yet Big Pharma lacks the financial incentive to create new antibiotics. That makes the creative research of scientists like de la Fuente incredibly valuable. —Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

Esther Wanjiru Kimani 

On a sun-baked morning in central Kenya, a small solar-powered device blinks to life beside a row of bean plants. It scans the leaves with a tiny camera, searching for the first signs of disease — the faint spots that might spell disaster for a farmer’s season. The machine was built by Esther Wanjiru Kimani, a computer scientist who believes technology’s most meaningful frontier isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in the fields where food begins.

Kimani grew up in Tigoni, a rural and mountainous village in Kenya, watching her parents battle unpredictable harvests. Each year, pests and blights crept through their crops faster than they could react. Years later, after she earned a degree in computer science from the University of Eldoret, northwest of Nairobi, she founded Farmer Lifeline Technologies, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers detect pests and diseases before they spread.

Her device, affordable and solar-powered, takes images of crops and then analyzes them in real time with machine-learning models. If the scan detects something amiss, it sends early-warning texts to farmers’ phones. 

It’s a simple system, but it could have profound implications in her home country and beyond: fewer chemical sprays, healthier yields, and more resilient livelihoods. In field trials, farmers using her technology have reduced crop losses by up to 30 percent and seen yield gains of roughly 40 percent — a game-changer in regions where even small fluctuations can decide whether a family has enough money to survive. 

Kimani’s work has earned global attention. In 2024, she won the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, becoming one of the few women — and one of the youngest — to ever receive the honor. I find her so inspiring because what her work embodies feels both humble and radical — and breaks the form of what you’d normally hear in the AI startup space. 

Her technology is an act of care. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor 

Gagandeep Kang

Few scientists have done more to turn India’s vaccine ambition into a working system than Gagandeep Kang. 

Kang is known for her critical role in advancing vaccines such as the one against rotavirus, a gut virus responsible for deadly bouts of diarrhea in young children. But Kang’s impact runs deeper than any single shot: She helped build the evidence, trial capacity, and translational systems that move vaccines in India from lab bench to bedside.

Kang began her career in the late 1980s as a microbiologist at the Christian Medical College in India, tracking the gut viruses that were hospitalizing hundreds of thousands of children and killing over 100,000 a year. Her early work on diarrheal diseases and rotavirus laid the groundwork for India’s vaccine research, then still in its infancy. In 2018, the World Health Organization approved Rotovac for global use — the first Indian-developed vaccine to meet international quality standards. A year later, India rolled it out nationwide, marking a turning point against one of its deadliest childhood infections. Today, Rotavac is used in several countries, including Ghana and Palestine, where it’s part of national immunization programs.

Kang has advised governments and the WHO, pushed for stronger ethics boards and transparent data, and led India’s Translational Health Science and Technology Institute to build clinical trial capacity from the ground up. In short, she brought order and rigor to India’s clinical research. During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she became India’s clearest public voice on tackling misinformation — she was measured, data-driven, and unwilling to trade science for politics.

In early January 2021, when India’s regulator approved the home-grown Covid-19 shot Covaxin before publishing results from its final round of testing, Kang publicly warned against the move: “Essentially, you are handing people who are anti-vaccine, anti-science, a weapon that they can use,” she told the Times of India.

Now at the Gates Foundation, Kang oversees global work on enteric infections, diagnostics, and genomics — the unsexy, but critical, plumbing in public health. Kang has spent her career proving that trust and transparency are as vital to public health as the vaccines themselves. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Geoffrey Otim

Synthetic biology is a field that redesigns life itself — engineering organisms to have new abilities. Already, we can harness microbes to clean up the environment or create sustainable fuels, and it’s only just the beginning.

The field has exploded in the past few decades around the world, but it’s been slower to catch on in Africa. Geoffrey Otim wants to change that.

Otim is the founder and CEO of SynBio Africa, a forum for advancing synthetic biology on the continent. Otim has extensive health security experience and spent more than eight years at a polio and measles laboratory in Uganda, working on outbreak response. 

He also consults for the UN while completing his doctoral work at the University of Queensland, which focuses on producing sustainable aviation fuel from genetically engineered microbial strains.

This offers tremendous promise, especially for Africa. The continent has and continues to endure extensive resource extraction, leading to African countries relying heavily on raw exports, which are commonly controlled by international companies and largely fail to translate to wealth for Africa’s people. Synthetic biology offers the potential to change the game.

In 2018, Otim founded East Africa’s first International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team. iGEM is an international organization that aims to foster talent and hosts the world’s largest synthetic biology competition. “We are determined to use synthetic biology to create both a better Africa and a better world,” Otim’s iGEM team said in a statement. 

Three years later, Otim spearheaded the first synthetic biology conference on the continent. He’s a strong advocate for using synthetic biology to create sustainable biofuels and potentially revolutionize the African economy, generate clean energy, and greatly improve health outcomes for all of humanity. —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Soham Sankaran

Soham Sankaran calls himself a “lapsed computer science researcher.” He left Cornell’s PhD program in robotics during the first year of the pandemic and took a sharp turn into — of all things — biology. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he watched India’s brutal Delta wave and ensuing vaccine shortages, and he decided that if no one in India was going to build cutting-edge vaccine tech, he would.

In late 2021, he founded PopVax, an mRNA vaccine startup in Hyderabad, a major city in southern India.

PopVax is trying to build broadly protective vaccines — shots that can protect against whole families of viruses, not just one strain at a time. To do that, Sankaran’s team uses computer models to predict which parts of a virus are least likely to change, and design mRNA vaccines that train the immune system to target those stable pieces. They’re also building the tools and capacity to make these kinds of vaccines, eventually at scale.

And the work is starting to get noticed. The National Institutes of Health will test PopVax’s next-gen Covid-19 booster in US clinical trials this year. The Gates Foundation is funding the team’s push to make mRNA vaccines that stay stable in an ordinary drive, and BARDA — the US government’s biomedical R&D agency — awarded PopVax $2 million in January 2025 to develop a needle-free patch for an mRNA flu vaccine that could be self-applied like a Band-Aid.

Sankaran’s pitch for this work is as moral as it is technical. He’s driven by the memory of AIDS-era drug inequity — when lifesaving HIV medicines were locked behind Western patents — and the belief that a life in Lagos or Lucknow should count the same as one in Los Angeles. “Unless we control intellectual property…we will continue to be treated as second class,” he said in a podcast appearance on Bretton Goods, “so, we have to do the research ourselves.”

With PopVax, he is trying to make that vision real — proving that smarter vaccine designs, faster platforms, and local capacity that can turn pandemic response from charity into competence, and more importantly, move lifesaving vaccines from the margins to the mainstream in the Global South. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Maxwell Scott 

Screwworms — gnarly flesh-eating parasites with a notorious reputation — are back at the US’s doorstep. Last month, Mexico confirmed a case in the northern border state of Nuevo León, less than 70 miles from Texas, and both countries are scrambling to hold the line.

It’s a familiar crisis for Maxwell Scott, the molecular geneticist at North Carolina State University who’s devoted much of his career to outsmarting the screwworm.

The US first beat these pests in the 1950s and ’60s using something called the sterile insect technique: The US Department of Agriculture would flood the landscape with sterilized males so wild females mate with them and lay eggs that never hatch. That strategy worked so well that, by the 1990s, screwworms were eliminated from the US and Mexico and pushed back to a narrow barrier in Panama’s Darién Gap. Today, Panama still maintains that sterile-fly barrier, a decades-long living fence keeping these pests from creeping north again.

Scott was so inspired by that success that he has been quietly reinventing it for the 21st century.

In his lab, Scott built a male-only screwworm line so control programs can release just males. This way there are no stray females, and every released fly competes for mates in the wild. It’s “a green technology,” he told me in a recent interview, “because it’s the pest itself that’s the control agent.” One of his engineered strains of the insect has even been field tested in Panama to measure how far the males flew and how long they lasted.

He’s also pushing the idea further with CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that can rewrite DNA with surgical precision. Instead of sterilizing males and releasing them over and over again — an expensive routine that never fully keeps the flies from rebounding — these CRISPR-edited flies carry a genetic tweak that breaks the fertility gene in some of their offspring, making them unable to reproduce and thinning the population from within.

It’s a fix that could reshape how we control screwworms. But for now, Scott says, it’s grounded more by politics than by science. “In the United States, we may never move away from [traditionally] sterilized males,” partly because of public wariness about genetic engineering. But in places like South America, where screwworms remain a scourge, these tools might find a warmer welcome, he says.

Scott’s work sits at the uneasy frontier of climate, genetics, and food security — exactly the kind of science we’ll need more of as a warming world helps parasites push farther and faster. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Yibo Li

In the paddies of China’s Yangtze River basin, the future of rice may hinge on a single gene.

Yibo Li, a plant geneticist at Huazhong Agricultural University, has helped uncover a temperature-sensitive gene in rice that threatens yields and grain quality as global temperatures rise. And now, he’s found a way to essentially turn it off.

Li and his team tested more than 530 rice varieties across four locations where nighttime temperatures have increased, searching for strains that could withstand heat. By examining which grains became chalky and which stayed translucent, they tracked the genetic markers responsible for the plant’s response. Their work, published earlier this year in the journal Cell, showed that modifying the gene or breeding naturally heat-resistant variants produced rice that retained both yield and quality under hot conditions.

This “reflects real-world environments, making the identified resistance genes more authentic and readily applicable to breeding programs,” Li told the Washington Post. In practical terms, the modified rice maintained its yield while unmodified crops produced up to 58 percent less grain — a dramatic difference with enormous implications for global food security. More than half of the world’s population relies on rice as a primary food staple.

Li’s vision extends beyond rice. He sees his findings as a possible template for tackling the climate challenge in other staple crops, like wheat, aiming to break the traditional trade-off between yield and quality. “Ultimately, we aim to develop innovative breeding strategies for high-yield, superior-quality crops,” he said. In a world where every extra degree of warmth can devastate harvests, Yibo Li’s work could be revolutionary for global food security. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor

The roots of the world’s most stubborn global health problems don’t yield to vibes-based solutions. They surrender to data, rigor, and the surprisingly radical idea of actually trying to figure out what works. 

Governments and nonprofit organizations depend on the economists, activists, policymakers, and writers who are reshaping how we understand poverty, health, and progress. They’re the ones making sure that every dollar saves the maximum number of lives, that foreign aid is steered by evidence instead of dogma.

They’re also the ones who are open to trying something new, such as giving the simplest solutions — like a plate of beans or a clear-eyed approach to masculinity — the platform they deserve. Because when it comes to making the world better, good intentions are just the starting line. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

Dean Karlan

When the Trump administration sicced its newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency” on the US Agency for International Development earlier this year, for just a moment, Dean Karlan offered to help.

After all, as USAID’s first chief economist, Karlan’s life’s work revolved around efficiency. His job was to help the agency stretch its dollars more effectively, save more lives, and propel US goals around the world. He has preached against waste, fraud, and abuse for longer than some of the DOGE bros have been alive. 

“I’m not a political appointee,” he told me earlier this year. “I’m just a dorky wonk who was on detail and who cares about the evidence of impact.” 

But it quickly became clear to Karlan that DOGE’s wrecking crew couldn’t care less about evaluating programs or prioritizing cost-effectiveness. His overtures to help went unanswered. Eventually, as he watched Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio take a sledgehammer to relatively cheap, lifesaving initiatives like PEPFAR, as longstanding colleagues were sacked, and the agency denigrated as a “ball of worms” and a “criminal organization” that needs “to die,” Karlan did the only honorable thing left to do: He quit. 

And, like thousands of other morally indignant ex-USAID employees, he can’t stop talking about what’s been left behind. While Karlan is the first to say the status quo wasn’t perfect, the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency has been absolutely catastrophic for vulnerable people around the world.

Karlan, who’s also a professor of economics and finance at Northwestern University, has kept busy since quitting USAID. He is the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit studying solutions to global poverty, and ImpactMatters, a nonprofit that rates charities and was later acquired by Charity Navigator. He has spoken far and wide about what the future may hold, and he is currently working on a bipartisan plan to restore a semblance of American foreign aid the morning after the Trump era comes to a close.

Karlan is still hopeful that the US can one day rebuild the architecture behind its global aid strategy. And when that time comes, he’ll be ready to talk efficiency — with anyone who actually wants to listen. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

Gary Barker

Concerns around the modern “masculinity crisis” — a catch-all term for worsening mental health among boys and men — has reached a fever pitch in recent years. And for good reason: Male suicide rates have been on the rise, men are working less, and boys are falling behind in education, among other troubling indicators.

As former Vox fellow Celia Ford has written, the crisis is “driving many young men toward the far-right ‘manosphere’ — where anachronistic attitudes about women, society, and gender roles are resurging.” 

Gary Barker, co-founder and CEO of Equimundo, a global research nonprofit working to “shift norms, narratives, and policies” around gender equality in the US and beyond, has been working for decades to build a counter to the manosphere attitude; it’s what he calls “positive masculinity.” His vision replaces the increasingly regressive view of manhood, based on ruthless competition, aggression, and emotional detachment, with one based on vulnerability, kindness, and warmth.

That vision is being realized through Equimundo’s innovative initiatives: The organization’s educational and activities-based MenCare+ program reduced violence by men against their partners in Rwanda by over 40 percent in a randomized control trial. Similar trials in other countries that used Program H — the organization’s program for young boys and girls — demonstrated positive effects, too. 

Equimundo also operates the IMAGES survey to understand men and women’s attitudes about gender equality, which since 2008 has interviewed 67,000 people in over 30 countries.

“We need to create space for more young men to be curious, to ask questions,” Barker wrote in a 2023 op-ed co-authored with Shaunna Thomas of the feminist nonprofit Ultraviolet. We need space for men, Barker and Thomas wrote, to “be unafraid and to explore a new, healthier model of identity.” — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Ken Opalo

Ken Opalo speaks about African politics the way some people talk about family: with affection, frustration, and an understanding of how hard it can be sometimes to make things work. At Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches political science, he’s made a study of Africa’s legislatures, tracing how power actually travels through them and how, despite the obstacles, it sometimes finds its way to the people it’s meant to serve.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and then educated at Yale and Stanford, Opalo established himself with his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa, as a gentle challenger to the easy clichés about Africa. The text is academic, but it reads more like a diagnosis (or even a love letter). It provides an account of how governments across the continent have grown not just from colonial scaffolds but from the chaos, ingenuity, and sheer persistence that followed independence. Institutions, he reminds us, aren’t dropped from the sky. They’re built, brick by imperfect brick, through struggle, compromise, and — truly — luck.

These days, Opalo is wrestling with what he calls “the growth question.” To him, development isn’t a glossy summit or a well-phrased aid campaign. It’s about building states that work, schools that teach, tax systems that function, and putting in place leaders who answer to the people who elect them. “Without growth,” he says, “everything else is noise.”

Beyond academia, Opalo writes An Africanist Perspective, a Substack newsletter where he translates political economy into stories that feel as lived-in as they are smart. There’s wit there, and weariness too. But Opalo is no doubt an optimist. He refuses to romanticize but insists that progress in the Global South will come because people refuse to give up on the hard, unglamorous work of democracy.

In both his scholarship and his storytelling, Opalo clearly believes the future is still being written by those who refuse to settle for dysfunction. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor 

Pascaline Dupas  

Pascaline Dupas is one of the more prolific and accomplished economists dedicated to reducing global poverty.

An economics professor at Princeton University, Dupas has published novel, highly cited papers on how access to banking affects small business development in Kenya, the effects of separating students into groups by achievement levels, and the power of distributing free bednets to prevent malaria, to name just a few. Her research has influenced British foreign aid, government policy in several African countries, the World Health Organization, large NGOs, and global health practitioners.

An avid collaborator, Dupas is also a scientific director at J-PAL — a network of hundreds of researchers conducting randomized control trials (the gold standard in research design) to figure out what policy interventions can best lift households out of poverty. In 2019, J-PAL’s founders were awarded the Nobel prize in economics.

Dupas herself has been directly recognized for her contributions to the field; in 2015, she was named the Best Young French Economist by the French newspaper Le Monde, and years later, was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter 

Paul Newnham

Paul Newnham wants to make beans sexy. 

If that sounds weird to you, consider that beans are the healthiest, most sustainable (by far), most affordable protein source on Earth. Their richness in vitamins, minerals, and fiber make them an ideal solution to malnutrition in low-income countries, as well as to chronic diet-related diseases in wealthy countries. And they’re diverse and versatile enough to be enjoyed in cuisines from every part of the world, from a garlicky Egyptian ful medames to an indulgent South Asian rajma. 

But beans suffer from a PR problem. They’re so cheap and they’ve long been so foundational to human diets that they aren’t aspirational, generally falling by the wayside as soon as a country becomes rich enough to eat large quantities of meat. Newnham leads Beans Is How — a campaign founded at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, aiming to double global bean consumption by 2028 — to change that. With a coalition of more than 120 partners globally, the initiative has secured commitments to get more beans onto menus around the world, from school meals to high-end, culturally influential restaurants. Partner organization AGRA (formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), for example, has helped serve high-iron beans, or beans bred to have extra-high iron content, to tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Kenya.   

Creative, ambitious work on beans has already been happening in siloes, from agricultural research to elite gastronomy. Newnham is unifying those efforts into an overhaul of the reputation of the humble bean, repositioning it as a sophisticated, modern solution for both people and the planet. —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor

Oliver Kim

The best case for why development economics still matters is being made on Substack. In his Global Developments newsletter, Oliver Kim — a Coefficient Giving research fellow — does something rare. He takes big, messy arguments about poverty, growth, and aid and rebuilds them from the data up. 

That means puncturing zombie “facts,” as he did in a viral post explaining why South Korea was not actually poorer than Kenya in 1960. It’s re-examining foreign aid’s track record with fresh historical series, and writing crisp explainers on workhorse development concepts like exchange rates that answer all the questions you were afraid to ask. 

Kim’s work is approachable without being glib, and rigorous without disappearing into mathiness. It’s also of the moment, focusing on how to direct scarce dollars and political capital toward what actually improves lives. That blend of clarity and empiricism is exactly what’s needed at a time when the competition for every dollar of aid is so intense. Kim’s writing is a compass you can actually steer by. —Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director

Correction, November 20, 12:15 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Pascaline Dupas’s job title.

Throughout the Western world, Madagascar is perhaps best known as a hot spot for wildlife, home to lemurs, chameleons, and other animals — a reputation popularized by movies like Madagascar and shows like Planet Earth. And it’s true that the country has an impressive array of creatures and plants that you can’t find anywhere else. Lemurs literally only exist on this island, as do almost half of the world’s chameleon species and most of its iconic baobab trees, stout species that are mostly trunk.

But although Madagascar is one of a kind, it’s not exactly the wildlife haven you might imagine. At least not anymore. 

The island has lost around half — or possibly far more — of its original forests and as much as half of the live coral off its coasts. Today, nearly all lemur species are threatened with extinction. So are half of the country’s chameleons and several species of tenrec, adorable hedgehog-like creatures that live only in Madagascar. Reef-dependent fisheries in some regions, meanwhile, are on the verge of collapsing.  

These declines are rooted in scarcity. Madagascar is one of the poorest and most malnourished countries on the planet. Last year, 80 percent of the island nation lived in extreme poverty, earning less daily than what $2.15 could buy you in the US in 2017. Nearly 40 percent of young children, meanwhile, have stunted growth due to a lack of nutrition.

This matters because, throughout much of the country, one of the only ways to earn money and buy food is by taking resources from the environment. People cut down forests, for example, to make and sell charcoal, a wood-based fuel, or to clear small parcels of land to grow crops. These sorts of activities aren’t inherently harmful; humans have always relied on nature for survival. But when people have no other way to earn a living, the pressure of extraction can become too much. 

There are several complex reasons why poverty still grips Madagascar, including political instability and corruption. Earlier this year, the Madagascar government was dissolved, the president was impeached, and the military assumed power, following weeks of protests in the capital of Antananarivo from people frustrated by power and water outages and a lack of economic opportunity. Together with climate change, the lingering effects of colonialism, and foreign aid structures, poor governance has stymied the growth of non-extractive industries.

As a result, a large number of people across Madagascar are highly dependent on the island’s ecosystems for their livelihoods — for their survival — and those ecosystems are starting to fail, partly because of the sheer scale of dependency. That makes conservation here both incredibly challenging and incredibly important. 

In September, I visited Madagascar in search of solutions. I was after ideas for how to sustain the country’s iconic ecosystems and animals as a means to support human well-being. What I found, in the southwest and eastern regions of the country, was more dim than I had expected. I saw clear signs of coral reefs in distress and fishermen facing hunger. I saw wildfires approaching one of the last intact stretches of highland forest. 

But I ultimately did find what I was after: solutions that actually seem to work. And though they were small-scale, their significance felt large. Because, as several experts told me along the way, if you can get conservation to work under these conditions, it’ll work anywhere. 

Part 1: Coral reefs

Scientists are testing a surprising approach to fighting hunger in one of the poorest places on Earth.

This story is also available in Malagasy, Madagascar’s national language.

Tsindrio eto raha te hamaky ity lahatsoratra ity amin’ny teny Malagasy.

Part 2: Lemurs

The world’s lemurs are going extinct. This is the only way to save them.

This story is also available in Malagasy, Madagascar’s national language.

Tsindrio eto raha te hamaky ity lahatsoratra ity amin’ny teny Malagasy.

Part 3: Chameleons

Scientists are racing to save these iconic animals in Madagascar from being wiped out.

This story is also available in Malagasy, Madagascar’s national language.

Tsindrio eto raha te hamaky ity lahatsoratra ity amin’ny teny Malagasy.

CREDITS:

Editorial lead: Paige Vega | Editors: Paige Vega, Bryan Walsh | Reporter: Benji Jones | Copy editors: Esther Gim, Melissa Hirsch, Sarah Schweppe, Kim Slotterback | Art director: Paige Vickers | Original photography: Garth Cripps | Translation: Aroniaina “Aro” Manampitahiana Falinirina, Hantarinoro Holifeno | Audience: Sydney Bergan, Bill Carey, Gabby Fernandez | Editorial directors: Elbert Ventura and Bryan Walsh

At Vox’s climate desk, we’ve spent the past few months digging into a threat that’s easy to swat away in the moment — but increasingly harder to escape: the rise of mosquito and other vector-borne diseases in the United States.

Most of us think of mosquitoes as little more than a summer nuisance. But climate change, urban sprawl, and global travel are reshaping their reach — and the range of the diseases they carry. Already, West Nile is entrenched across much of the country. Dengue, chikungunya, and even malaria are beginning to take root again. And now, another menace may be on the way: The Oropouche virus, once confined to the Amazon, is spreading in cities across South America and has already appeared in travelers returning to the US.

Our climate correspondent Umair Irfan has been tracing this shift from multiple angles. His field reporting from Texas, where researchers are running one of the country’s most advanced mosquito surveillance systems, shows how close we are to outbreaks slipping past our defenses. His reporting also highlights how fragile US public health capacity has become, just as the risks are accelerating. To help readers understand these threats, he’s also built a practical guide: how to identify the seven mosquito species that matter most for disease in the US.

Taken together, these stories are far more than just a climate or a science story; they capture the bigger picture of a major public health threat that intersects with the lives of people across the country. Whether you live in Houston or Boston, what’s happening in the world of vector-borne disease will shape your summers, your neighborhoods, and your health.

You can find all of our stories below, but I recommend you start with our illustrated guide to the seven most dangerous mosquitoes in the US. Because what used to be called “tropical disease” is no longer all that tropical, and it’s important for all of us to stay vigilant. —Paige Vega, climate editor

If you value in-depth reporting like this, consider becoming a Vox Member today.

Mosquitoes at the US southern border reveal a frightening reality about climate change

This small Texas city is leading the country’s response in fighting the rising threat of vector-borne diseases.

Your guide to identifying the 7 most dangerous mosquitoes in the US

There are more than 200 mosquito species in the country — but just a few to worry about.

Inside Texas’s grand laboratory of dangerous mosquitoes

While the rest of the country turned a blind eye to ancient disease threats, these scientists leaned in.

Meet the Oropouche virus. It may be visiting your city soon.

Beware of the biting midge.

As Down to Earth enters its fourth year, the urgency surrounding the global biodiversity crisis has never been more apparent. When we launched this project in 2021, our mission was clear: to bring the complex issues surrounding biodiversity into the public eye in a way that was both accessible and compelling. 

Since then, we’ve dug deep into the forces threatening the natural world, from deforestation and habitat destruction to the cascading impacts of climate change. Our reporting has been featured by the national Climate Desk collaboration, shared by popular national radio and broadcast programs, and has been cited in government reports that help inform policy. Vox is one of the nation’s few mainstream newsrooms that is committed to covering biodiversity. Along the way, we’ve showcased the wonder of nature — its complexity, vibrancy, and immense value — while making the case that biodiversity isn’t just a concern for ecologists; it’s something that impacts every single one of us.

In the years that have passed since we launched Down to Earth, the biodiversity crisis has deepened. Over a million species face extinction, ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest are tipping into collapse, and climate change is playing an increasingly influential role in the decline of biodiversity. The need for informed conversation and urgent action has never been more pressing. Protecting biodiversity isn’t just about saving the animals and plants we love; it’s about securing the foundations of human life itself — our food, water, medicine, and climate stability. The need for robust, thoughtful, and accessible reporting on these issues is clearer than ever.

This year, we’re excited to build on our coverage. We will tell stories that explore big ideas in the environmental movement; spark wonder and celebrate the incredible species with which we share the planet; connect news and emerging research to real-world stakes; and explain how animals and ecosystems are changing under human influence.

At Down to Earth, our mission is to make biodiversity more mainstream — and make it a central part of the conversation we’re all having about the future of our planet. We believe that understanding the natural world doesn’t have to be daunting or depressing. That’s why we approach every story with the same down-to-earth, approachable, and conversational style that Vox is known for. Whether we’re diving into complex scientific research or telling the stories of the species and ecosystems most at risk, we want you to feel like you’re right there with us, learning and exploring together. We’re here to make this conversation as engaging and accessible as it is urgent.

With the support of the BAND Foundation, we’re poised to explore conservation’s most pressing questions today, with the expertise of environmental correspondent Benji Jones leading the charge. We’ll also feature contributions from a diverse range of freelance writers, all bringing fresh perspectives and stories.

In our next chapter of Down to Earth, you’ll continue to find stories that not only inform but also inspire action. From the unseen heroes of the natural world — the enigmatic species that provide essential services to humanity — to the big-picture investigations into predator restoration and the environmental policy decisions shaping our future, we’re committed to giving you the full picture.

As we move forward, our goal remains the same: to help you understand why biodiversity matters — why it’s worth protecting — and to connect the dots between the natural world and the broader, urgent challenges facing humanity. The crisis is real, but with awareness, action, and engagement, we can still save so much.