If the years were to be judged by news headlines, 2015 was marked by news regarding Islamist terror.
The year started off with the chaos at Charlie Hebdo, followed by the shootings on 13th November along with attacks witnessed in Ankara and San Bernadino.
Come to think of it, even that presents a distorted view of the happenings as terrorism accounted for more lives in Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria and Syria compared to France and the U.S.
In case the crash of the Russian civilian airliner was a result of ISIS’s plot, it accounted for many more lives compared to Paris attacks.
There is no doubt that terrorism is quite devastating.
However, it also contributes to those television ratings that sponsors look forward to.
While we may have overlooked them, there were some encouraging happenings last year.
Sadly, only one of these got the attention of the media for the most part which was the international climate agreement in Paris.
Only time will tell if the world will succeed at restricting global warming below 2 degrees, as decided in the agreement.
The encouraging bit is that a total of 194 countries participated in and accepted the international climate agreement.
The interesting part is that cutting down on the greenhouse gases that the participating countries have been emitting would still not meet the goal they have decided.
There is a silver lining here, though.
The dedication to review the effort to this cause spans over a total of five years, so adjustments will be made from time to time to keep the whole process realistic.
It is still early to say how effective this will turn out to be, especially following the unfruitful Copenhagen climate change summit, 2009.
It goes without saying that the second best thing that happened in 2015 was the population of the world living in poverty dropping below 10%, as per World Bank.
Perhaps, the news headlines could have been different, after all.
Source: WeForum
