Top events of 2023 that have made a permanent mark on the world

As we near the end of 2023, we can’t help but think that it may be a good year to leave behind. As we look back at how it panned out over much of the globe, not much positive seems to have happened. It was a year of death and destruction — some caused by nature and some by man. Here are some of the key events that rocked the world — in many cases, literally — in 2023.

10. Catholic Church changes with the times

Starting with the positives, the Catholic Church, under Pope Francis, continued to adopt modern practices to change itself with the times.

In October, at the Synod of Bishops, women and laypeople were allowed to vote on specific proposals, alongside bishops, for the future of the Church. Pope Francis, who has always been known for his liberal views, called for women to have governance roles in the Church.

In December, the Pope made news again when he formally allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and urged Vatican bureaucrats later in the month to avoid rigid ideological positions that prevent them from the understanding the reality today.

How these moves go with the conservatives over time remains to be seen.

9. AI gets smarter — and more controversial

Last year ended with Open AI churning up a storm with the launch of ChatGPT that shored up a million users within a mere five days. Since then, for much of 2023, there have been heated debates over the future of artificial intelligence (AI), the future of humans vis-à-vis, and whether the two can coexist peacefully.

As AI tools based on large-language models got better and better, with ChatGPT clearing the Wharton MBA exam and the US law and medical licensing exams, and flaunting other similar feats, alarmed educational institutions worldwide went on an overdrive to ban their use for students.

Even as the tech top guns raced to match ChatGPT’s heroics — with Meta launching Llama 2 and Elon Musk launching Grok — and OpenAI itself announced the launch of GPT-4 Turbo, its most powerful AI tool yet, heated debates continued over whether AI was a friend or foe to humans. With the worldwide recession continuing alongside, thousands continued to lose jobs and the unprecedented rise of AI sparked fears of even greater job loss.

The year ended with the first global summit on AI being held in the UK in November, where countries agreed to make joint efforts to manage the potential risks. The European Union is drafting its first AI Act, while the US has issued its first executive order on AI management.

Will 2024 bring more clarity to this heated debate? We have to wait and watch.

8. Worsening climate crisis and COP28

Even as countries agreed for the first time at the December COP28 to gradually move away from the use of fossil fuels as energy sources to achieve net zero by 2050, the question remained whether it was too little too late. Because, 2023 also made news for being the hottest in 125,000 years. And, with that, the Earth shifted from a “warming” phase to a “heating” one.

By the time the countries pledged to triple renewable power capacity by 2030, the planet was poised to zoom past the 2-degrees-Celsius limit etched in the 2015 Paris Agreement. And with that continued extreme weather events around the globe, including killer heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, extreme droughts, and record flooding.

People learnt a new term in 2023 — “wet-bulb temperature” — that had so far been largely in academic and technical use. It essentially denotes that high heat combined with high humidity can be a deadly cocktail. The survivability threshold is set at 35°C, beyond which our bodies would be unable to cool down through sweating, increasing the risk of a fatal heatstroke.

For the record, in November last year, the World Bank had warned in a report that India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures could rise beyond the survivability threshold of 35°C.

A major focus of COP28 was also on the Loss and Damage Fund, with countries striking a deal on how to compensate developing and poor countries that bear the brunt of the climate crisis despite contributing little to it.

7. Titan, the submersible that imploded

In June, a submersible that went missing on its way to the Titanic wreckage caught the attention of the world. The five-member crew included Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, which owned and operated the submersible named Titan, British adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

After a days-long frantic search produced no result — the rescuers racing against a 96-hour window of air supply in the submersible — the US Navy studied its acoustic data to figure out that the submersible had likely imploded, killing all five on board. The wreckage of Titan was found later, within 500 metres of the more famous Titanic wreckage, and with it, human remains.

The incident sparked interest worldwide for the uncanny similarities with the original Titanic tragedy, with many suggesting that James Cameron might make a film on this one too — a rumour he brusquely shut down. Even as allegations of lack of safety in OceanGate submersibles cropped up, the company nonchalantly promoted more such trips in the coming year — for a whopping $250,000 per head.

And then, just like that, Titan vanished from headlines and frantic drawing room discussions.

6. Political and economic crises in the subcontinent

Not everything was well in India’s neighbourhood in 2023. A cash-strapped Pakistan saw high drama over the arrest of its former Prime Minister Imran Khan in two high-profile cases — one related to alleged corruption and one to an alleged murder. As the year ends, Khan has been convicted in the Toshakhana corruption case and handed a three-year jail term.

Even as the ruckus over Khan’s arrest raged across the country, his rival Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister, made a dramatic return to this homeland after a four-year self-imposed exile in the UK. A lot of eyes are on the Pakistan general elections in February 2024, which always hold significance for neighbours, especially India.

Talking of elections in the neighbourhood, Bangladesh is also bracing for polls in 2024, and a political crisis has been going on there too, with the Khaleda Zia-led Bangladesh Nationalist Party accusing the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League of atrocities. The Bangladesh elections are on January 7, and trouble is only growing in the small nation hemmed by Indian territory.

On the other hand, neighbouring Myanmar is grappling with the possibility of a collapse of the ruling military Junta, while Sri Lanka continues to crawl out of the economic crisis that hit it last year. The new year is expected to throw up some resolutions to these uncertainties.

5. Earthquakes in Turkey, Afghanistan, Nepal, China

The year 2023 was one of earthquakes. Close to 60,000 people were killed — more than 50,000 in Turkey and some 9,000 in Syria — when a massive 7.8 earthquake struck these two countries on February 6. As the temblor flattened houses, some 14 million people were estimated to be affected as they were left without food or shelter in the crippling winter cold.

The very next month, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake hit Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, leaving some 2,000 people dead, most of them women and children.

In November, a 5.8-magnitude temblor struck western Nepal’s Jajarkot, killing some 150-odd people, while another big one of 6.2 magnitude came in China in December, leaving some 120 people dead in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

4. Migration crisis spreads tentacles

The migration and refugee crisis has been worsening across various parts of the world for years, and now has reached dystopian proportions. While pictures of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach moved the world to tears in 2015, waking it up to the horrors of the migration and refugee crisis, many more like that two-year-old Syrian boy have since perished in the ocean.

Capsized migrant boats kept making headlines in 2023, with a fishing boat sinking off the Greek coast generating the most buzz. It contained, among others, scores of Pakistani nationals, many of whom perished in the Mediterranean. Later in the year, at least two more boats capsized, one near Tunisia and another near Greece.

Closer home, Rohingya refugees continue to flee the crisis-torn Myanmar or Bangladesh, with many taking boats to Indonesia, where they have been unwelcome as well. Only on December 25, one such migrant boat was intercepted in Andaman after the United Nations repeatedly sent out notices for two boats being adrift in the Andaman Sea.

And very recently, right after Shah Rukh Khan and Rajkumar Hirani introduced India to “dunki (or donkey) flights”, India was witness to a real “donkey flight” that was intercepted in France on its way to Nicaragua and promptly sent back.

The issue is also now shaping world politics like never before. While UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s career hinges on “stopping the boats”, the Dutch government collapsed in July over bitter disputes regarding migration policy.

As thousands continue to flee for their lives or in search of a better livelihood, packed like sardines in the bowels of rickety ships, only to meet a watery grave or the prospect of imprisonment or deportation, Britain’s contentious policy to pack them off to Rwanda is no less dystopian. Who needs dystopian novels anymore?

3. The ongoing civil war in Sudan

Surprised to see this one on the list? As the two wars in the northern hemisphere hogged the limelight, few kept track of a war that has been raging in Sudan since April 15 and has claimed more than 10,000 lives.

The fighting, between the Sudanese Armed Forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Hemedti, two rival factions of the country’s military government, has been concentrated around the capital city of Khartoum and the Darfur region.

As reported in October, some 9,000 to 10,000 people had already been killed and some 6,000 to 12,000 injured. As reported on December 23, over 5 million were internally displaced and more than 1.5 million had fled the country as refugees. And way back in August, the UN had warned that more than six million people were “one step away from famine”.

2. Russia-Ukraine stalemate and the Wagner drama

And as we go into 2024, so does the war between Russia and Ukraine that has been dragging for nearly two years now.

On the one hand, it has shown the resilience of Ukraine — bolstered by a constant supply of military aid from the US — and on the other, the obstinacy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has continued despite sanctions from the western world, and perhaps even knowing that he’ll not win this one.

The conflict, which has now become largely deadlocked, with both sides refusing to back down, continues to impact global security, food security, politics, and economy.

Even as the conflict — that hogged the limelight in 2022 — stopped making headlines this year, with people largely forgetting about it as “just another thing”, it was back in the news majorly in June over a rebellion by a mercenary unit called Wagner Group, which took over Russian military facilities in Rostov-on-Don and threatening to march all the way to Moscow.

The nail-biting mutiny drama ended with Russia striking a deal with Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, agreeing to his escape to Belarus, and then Prigozhin dramatically dying in a plane crash. Did Putin have a hand it in? He vociferously denied it but the debate still continues.

1. Hamas attack and Israel unleashing its wrath on Gaza

And now, for the news that shook the world on October 7 and has since been hogging the limelight, for all the wrong reasons. On that fateful day, a Hamas raid on southern Israel left some 1,200 people dead and around 240 people were taken hostage.

Since then, some 21,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, have paid the price as Israel vowed to exact revenge. With more than 100 hostages still presumably remaining in Hamas captivity, Israel has been pounding Gaza with air and ground attacks, flattening most parts of the north and now turning south as millions of Palestinians continue to flee in search of a safe refuge.

After a brief pause towards the end of November, when some hostages were exchanged for prisoners Israel took in retaliation, the fighting only intensified. Israel’s close ally US and some other western powers made a brief show of trying to stop the war, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken making multiple trips across the region. But no one castigated Israel outright on the pretext that it has the right to defend itself.

And hence, the world watches as Gaza gets decimated.

Will peace prevail in 2024? With such high hopes, we wish you a Happy New Year.