A year’s worth of bad news provides a checklist of ways to do things better. Whether it’s greater preparedness for the next disaster or evidence that the world’s peoples trend more to friendship than to enmity, tragedy tends to bring us together in giving, rebuilding and planning.

Let’s reflect on some of the good that’s come out of tragedies over the past 12 months.

There’s been a lot of bad – from the devastating Asian tsunami that struck Dec. 26 least year, wiping out coastal communities across a dozen nations, to last summer’s destruction of a major U.S. city when New Orleans’ levees failed after Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina was followed by a magnitude-7.6 earthquake centered in the mountains of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir that rained concrete blocks on the heads of schoolchildren. Despite the loss of more than 80,000 lives, “compassion fatigue” following earlier disasters dampened donations and impedes wintertime relief efforts.

Yet for the first time in many years, the “Line of Control” separating Pakistan- and India-controlled Kashmir was demilitarized to allow aid to pass.

The conflict between the world’s haves and have-nots over trade, aid, disease prevention and climate protections also contains both pluses and minuses.

On the negative side, the standoff impedes coordinated responses that would help more people. World trade talks, for instance, flounder over the issue of agricultural subsidies and inflated Third World expectations. The absence of realistic deal-making on global warming makes progress on the long-term challenge almost impossible.

Yet there also are pluses. Protesting farmers outside the recent World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong showed that a large chunk of rural people are not ready to give up their traditional lifestyles, no matter how many iPods are given as gifts. It’s a reminder that trade negotiators need to give nations the flexibility to preserve traditional farming while also pursuing market-opening measures that will increase the bounty and lower the price of food over time.

It’s hard to see silver linings in some of the other disasters that beset humankind this past year.

Last December’s Asian tsunami cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Some who survived reportedly still live in the tents they got in February. Despite a record outpouring of global charity, many reconstruction efforts are mired in discord or charges of corruption.

A significant exception, however, is the trains of Sri Lanka. In a historic moment of reconciliation, Sri Lanka’s traditionally feuding rail workers and managers got “the trains running again in just 57 days,” USA Today reports, with minimal supplies, in an atmosphere of deep grieving over lost loved ones and without much international help.

Today, 77,000 Sri Lankans ride the repaired lines every working day. The rails stand as a reminder of what can be accomplished if cooperation trumps partisanship.

The flooding of New Orleans was one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. The federal government has pledged that the city will rise again, that its people will not be abandoned, and that work will proceed apace to meet that promise.

Meanwhile, the disaster brought home to tens of millions of Americans a valuable lesson: that this nation remains woefully underprepared for another terrorist attack.

The watchdog Government Accountability Office reported more than a year ago that not a single U.S. state was medically ready to handle a mass-casualty disaster. Those findings received wide airing only after Katrina.

Other aspects of Katrina relief failures also must force us to raise the bar for how future disasters are handled – from the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency was considered a bureaucratic backwater suitably led by an Arabian horse expert to local authorities’ seeming inability to mobilize a last-minute evacuation.

From nuclear holocaust to global flu pandemics, far more severe threats to worldwide peace and well-being exist than what confronted the world this past year. Yet the willingness of antagonists to work together to alleviate the hurt afflicting fellow humans after disaster struck stands as a signal victory for the peacemakers – one that we might be able to build on in 2006.