Our World in Data is looking for new Trustees to help steer the project’s strategic direction, ensure our long-term sustainability, and provide critical oversight and constructive challenge to the two Executive Co-Directors.
Curious to know more? Read on… 🧵
Ecuador is now vaccinating very rapidly. 12% of the population received a vaccine in the last week.
[here is all our data for countries around the world: ]
The decline of COVID in Israel.
This chart is indexed to the peak of cases and shows the relative decline by age group since then.
For some time there was a slight temporary rise among younger people (who get vaccinated last).
But recently cases declined for all age groups.
The end of poverty is possible.
Each country shown on this chart achieved a large decline in extreme poverty over the last generation.
This is one of the most important lessons we can learn from the available data: rapid progress against poverty can be achieved.
The timing of the peak cherry tree blossom is influenced by spring temperatures.
Based on data from Japan stretching back to the year 812 (!), we see that in recent centuries the peak blossom has gradually moved earlier in the year—due to higher temperatures from climate change.
Some countries responded successfully to the pandemic – and more broadly, some are much more successful in protecting their population’s health.
We contributed to
@exemplarshealth
, a new publication to learn from the most successful countries in the world
Nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are both vastly safer and cleaner than fossil fuels.
From the perspective of both human health and climate change, it matters less whether we transition to nuclear or renewables, and more that we stop relying on fossil fuels.
The world population has increased by 145% since 1961.
But because yields of cereals increased even more (+200%), it became possible to produce more cereal per capita while not needing much more land (+12%).
From our entry on crop yields
💉 7.8 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered
👥 53% of world population with at least 1 dose
🌍 Total doses per 100 people
High-income countries: 147
Upper-middle income: 146
Lower-middle income: 68
Low income: 7
Our data on vaccinations:
How many animals get slaughtered every day?
Hundreds of millions of animals get killed for meat every day.
Read more:
From our new page on animal welfare:
64,000 retweets and 365,000 likes. This might be the most widely shared
@OurWorldInData
chart ever.
If you want to know "what's going on here", this is our post from which this chart is taken:
One of the most transformative changes in technology over the last few decades has been the massive drop in the cost of clean energy. Solar photovoltaic costs have fallen by 90% in the last decade, onshore wind by 70%, and batteries by more than 90%.
These technologies have
Weather forecasting has come a long way.
The biggest improvements we’ve seen are for longer timeframes.
By the early 2000s, 5-day forecasts were “highly accurate” and 7-day forecasts are reaching that threshold today.
"Problems are solvable. Given enough time we can end the horrors of today. Poverty is not inevitable. Diseases that are incurable today might be curable in just a few generations."
From
@MaxCRoser
's new post on the vast future that is ahead of us
How different would your life be if you never went to school & didn’t learn how to read & write?
This is the reality for the 58 million children who don't go to school.
As terrible as this is, it used to be much worse. We can make progress
#EducationDay
Our data on COVID-19 vaccinations is updated:
Share of people with at least 1 dose:
🇮🇱 Israel 60%
🇬🇧 UK 43%
🇨🇱 Chile 32%
🇧🇭 Bahrain 27%
🇺🇸 US 26%
🇷🇸 Serbia 20%
🇭🇺 Hungary 19%
🇫🇮 Finland 14%
🇸🇬 Singapore 14%
🇪🇪 Estonia 13%
🇺🇾 Uruguay 13%
🇰🇼 Kuwait 12%
An UPDATE on the decline of Covid in Israel.
This chart is indexed to the peak of cases and shows the relative decline by age group since then.
Since the peak cases have declined by more than 90% *for all age groups*.
How has the world managed to feed a rapidly growing population with ever-shrinking land resources?
A big part has been increasing crop yields — e.g., we can now produce more than three times as much cereal from a given area of land as we could in 1961.
In China in 1981, 97% of people in the countryside lived in extreme poverty.
By 2020, the share was well below 1%.
Large economic growth made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to leave extreme poverty behind, first in cities and then in the countryside.
Two centuries ago the majority of people was extremely poor, no matter where they were born.
Back then it was widely believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible.
– from 'What is growth?'
The number of people killed in disasters has fallen a lot over the last century, despite there being four times as many people.
Deaths have declined not because disasters are now less frequent or intense, but because we’ve become better at protecting ourselves and each other.
We are very happy that our work is useful for so many.
In the last 365 days had more than 100 million visitors and in addition to this our work is cited thousands of times every day.
The
@WHO
, the
@NYTimes
, and
@TheEconomist
all rely on
@OurWorldInData
.
What is the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet?
Plant-based protein sources still have a lower footprint than the lowest-impact meat products, despite large differences in farming practices across the world.
Read more:
#WorldVeganDay
According to our count at
@OurWorldInData
3 billion vaccine doses have now been administered.
– The first half a billion took 114 days.
– The last half a billion were administered in the last 13 days.
We keep counting vaccinations around the world at:
We won a prize for our work on the pandemic!
The
@TheOxfordTrust
awarded us the "Covid Innovation Heroes Awards 2021”:
We are very grateful for this recognition here in our hometown of Oxford.
According to the latest Global Burden of Disease Study — published last month by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) — COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in 2021, after cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
These estimates suggest that COVID-19 was
The timing of the peak cherry tree blossom is influenced by spring temperatures.
Based on data from Japan stretching back to the year 812 (!), we see that in recent centuries the peak blossom has gradually moved earlier in the year—due to higher temperatures from climate change.
What are the safest & cleanest sources of energy?
All energy sources have negative effects, but they differ enormously in size:
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest & most dangerous by far, while both renewable and nuclear are vastly safer & cleaner
Learn more
In today's Biweekly Digest, we cover:
• Why life expectancy in US is lower than in other rich countries
• Our redesigned work on Democracy
• We're hiring a Data Scientist
• Help us help you by taking our survey
Read
Subscribe
The change in the world population is determined by 2 metrics: the number of babies born & the number of people dying
Toward the end of this century, the number of deaths is projected to surpass that of births, bringing global population growth to an end
It is the first time during the pandemic that we report more than 1 million confirmed cases per day as the average over 7 days.
[source with all our data ]
Hunting and habitat loss drove many large mammals in Europe close to extinction.
But the continent’s mammal populations are making a comeback thanks to conservation efforts and more productive agriculture.
Learn more:
The number of daily COVID deaths in UK since the peak three months ago.
This is plotted on a logarithmic axis. A straight line on a log axis shows exponential change with a constant rate – in this case exponential decay.
[all data ]
According to the most recent data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, India now consumes more coal than the continents of Europe and North America combined.
The chart shows this was not the case until recently. Coal consumption in Europe and North
Eating meat with a lower carbon footprint often means killing more animals and treating them more poorly.
@hannahritchie
presents the research on the trade-offs between environmental protection and animal welfare.
Where do global greenhouse gas emissions come from?
→ 73.2% from energy
→ 18.4% from agriculture, forestry, land use
→ 5.2% direct industry
→ 3.2% from waste
Our latest article looks at global emissions, sector-by-sector.
Electricity in the UK was for decades dominated by coal (the worst source for the climate).
But this is now largely history.
Coal declined down to 2%.
As
@MaxCRoser
explains in this post () this was possible, in part, thanks to carbon pricing.
How many have died worldwide in the pandemic?
One way to answer this question is to estimate the global excess mortality since the start of the pandemic.
The Economist did this and their latest estimate is that 18 million people died.
This map shows the death rate per country.
We teamed up with our friends at
@Kurz_Gesagt
again to make a video about climate change.
It looks at the 4 factors driving CO₂ emissions, and how we can use these levers to find solutions.
This chart gives an overview of 3.4 million years of accelerating technological change.
We live at a time when the world can change dramatically within our lifetime.
From
@maxcroser
's new article, which we published just now:
What are the safest sources of energy?
Death rates from modern renewables & nuclear are similar, & orders of magnitude lower than fossil fuels
Moving away from fossil fuels is a win-win for climate & health – regardless of what we choose
Latest article:
Energy demand in China has increased rapidly over the last few decades due to rising incomes and industrialization.
The country now uses about the same amount of energy per person as the European Union. You can see this in this chart, with new data from the Energy Institute’s
How fast are different countries vaccinating their population against COVID?
Israel: 11.6%
UK: 1.5%
US: 0.9%
Germany: 0.2%
World: 0.13%
→ Data for more countries you find in our COVID vaccine dataset here:
The chart shows one of the most important achievements in humanity's history — in the last 200 years the majority of the world left the very worst poverty behind.
[from
@MaxCRoser
's post 'The history of the end of poverty has just begun' ]
Without data we can not understand the pandemic.
And so we set ourselves the goal of building the most helpful global dashboard to understand what is happening.
Now it is out:
👇A thread on what you can do with our new
#COVID19
Data Explorer.
Our data on COVID-19 vaccinations has been updated:
Doses administered:
🌏 World 11.4M
🇨🇳 China 4.5M
🇺🇸 United States 4.2M
🇮🇱 Israel 1M
🇬🇧 United Kingdom 1M
🇩🇪 Germany 189k
🇨🇦 Canada 108k
🇧🇭 Bahrain 60k
🇷🇺 Russia 52k
🇮🇹 Italy 48k
Per capita in the chart:
Despite their brief history, computers and AI have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do.
Little is as important for the future of the world, and our own lives, as how this history continues.
Read more:
In 1990, over 9% of the world's newborns did not survive beyond age five.
By 2021, this child mortality rate had declined to 3.7%.
Thanks to progress in global health, 132 million more people are alive in our world today.
New article by
@MaxCRoser
→
How many people die and how many are born each year?
And what does this mean for the population, now and in the coming decades?
Explore the data in our interactive charts, and read more here:
There are 3 global datasets on
#COVID19
:
the WHO, Johns Hopkins Uni, & the European CDC
We brought the data from all 3 together to allow you to compare the data – globally and for every country in the world.
We also explain why we stopped using WHO data.
There is no paywall,
all our work is free for everyone to use for all purposes,
and all our software is open-source.
Our World In Data is entirely a public good.
👇 If you want to support us in doing our daily work we would very much appreciate it.
Smallpox ravaged humanity for millennia and is estimated to have killed 300 million people in just the 20th century
But since 1978 not one person has died of smallpox—thanks to vaccines it has been successfully eradicated
What makes a disease eradicable?
The concept of “leapfrogging” is popular in development. It suggests that lower-income countries can, as they develop, skip intermediate technologies or systems to go straight to the modern equivalent.
One example of this is the use of landlines and mobile phones.
The landline
• If you live on $30 a day you are part of the richest 15%.
• The majority of the world is very poor: the poorer half of the world – almost 4 billion people – live on less than $6.70 a day.
A chart from
@MaxCRoser
's text on global inequality:
Two centuries ago almost everyone lived on less than $5 per day (96% of the world population).
This is adjusted for inflation and it is taking non-monetary sources of income into account.
Historian Michail Moatsos estimates that 80% of the world population lived in extreme poverty.
His research shows how poverty has declined over the course of the last two centuries, especially rapidly in recent decades.
From our new poverty page
In 1820, only 1 in 10 people over the age of 15 could read. Today, the corresponding global literacy rate — the share of adults aged 15 and older who can read and write — is 87%. That means more than 5 billion people can read and write today, compared to fewer than 100 million
Response to the pandemic has often been framed as a trade-off between protecting health and the economy.
This isn't reflected in the latest GDP data.
As
@JoeHasell
explores: countries with the lowest death rate have also performed better economically.
Intense whaling drove many of the world’s whale species close to extinction.
But a dramatic decline in whale hunting since then has given them hopes of recovery.
Learn more:
#WorldWildlifeDay
If you need data on the pandemic, we make our entire database freely accessible for everyone.
– We maintained it since the early days last year and will continue to do so.
– We update this database every day.
👇Here it is.
💉 6.4 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered
👥 46% of world population with at least 1 dose
🌍 Share with at least 1 dose
High-income countries: 69%
Upper-middle income: 64%
Lower-middle income: 32%
Low income: 2%
Our data on vaccinations:
This is the COVID case rate over the last 7 days in European countries.
From very low rates in Iceland and the UK to high rates in Cyprus and Sweden.
[Here in our COVID Data Explorer you find all data for all countries:
]
“In the last hundred years of its existence smallpox killed at least half a billion people.”
@MaxCRoser
’s post on humanity’s battle against the microbes – and how we learned to protect ourselves thanks to science, public health, and vaccines.
Some technologies follow learning curves. They become cheaper as more of that technology gets produced.
Batteries are following a learning curve – the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 97% in the last 3 decades.
→
@_HannahRitchie
's article:
Fertility rates — which measure the average number of children per woman — have been falling worldwide. Since 1950, global fertility rates have halved, from almost 5 children per woman to 2.3.
As a result, global population growth has slowed dramatically, and many countries'
A very depressing fact about the last three decades: The share of electricity produced from low-carbon sources has not increased.
[From
@MaxCRoser
's recent post on the world’s energy problem: ]
The map here shows vaccine booster doses administered per 100 people in the population.
Most countries have not reported administering any booster doses, while a few have administered a large number.
Israel, for example, has administered 44 booster doses for every 100 people.
We have now added Omicron to the variant data shown in our Data Explorer:
For now, only Botswana has sequenced and reported Omicron cases to
@GISAID
.
As always, this data is available thanks to the *great work* of
@firefoxx66
at !
Daily COVID-19 vaccine doses administered per million people (7-day average):
🇮🇱 Israel 14,498
🇪🇸 Spain 1,209
🇩🇰 Denmark 1,069
🇺🇸 United States 1,025
🇬🇧 United Kingdom 639
🇩🇪 Germany 470
🇲🇽 Mexico 38
Our database:
Death rates from illicit drugs are the highest in the United States. This is largely the result of a steep rise in opioid deaths in recent years.
This map shows death rates from opioid overdoses, measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people in each country’s population.
The ozone layer holes have stopped growing and are starting to close.
They were caused by human emissions of ozone-depleting substances. But the world came together, and those emissions have been reduced by >99%.
Read more on our redesigned topic page:
"What’s frustrating about the challenge of climate change is not that we have no options, but that we do not take the options we have.”
writes
@MaxCRoser
in his 'The Argument for a Carbon Price' →
Globally, we emit around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.
Which activities give rise to these emissions?
In this article we take a closer look, sector by sector:
12.3 million people have received a COVID vaccine according to our global vaccination dataset.
And the curve is getting steeper – the number of daily vaccinations is increasing.
→ All our COVID vaccination charts and data:
Almost no one has “heat” or “cold” written on their death certificate, but sub-optimal temperatures lead to a large number of premature deaths — most often in people over the age of 65.
In two new articles,
@_HannahRitchie
examines how many people die from heat and cold each
COVID-19 Testing is crucial.
There is no central database with official data, so we are going through press releases and national reports to bring it all into one place.
Here is what we have as of 13 March 9.00GMT
Our data on COVID-19 vaccinations is updated daily:
Share of people with at least 1 dose:
🇮🇱 Israel 60%
🇬🇧 UK 41%
🇦🇪 UAE 35%
🇨🇱 Chile 29%
🇧🇭 Bahrain 25%
🇺🇸 US 24%
🇷🇸 Serbia 19%
🇭🇺 Hungary 16%
🇫🇮 Finland 13%
🇪🇪 Estonia 13%
🇲🇦 Morocco 12%
🇩🇰 Denmark 11%
This rise and fall of smoking is shown in this chart. Smoking rates grew rapidly across rich countries in the 20th century. But by the 1980s, they went into steep decline.
It looked like poorer countries would follow a similar path as incomes increased, but rates have decreased
Two centuries ago most people lived in extreme poverty, no matter where in the world they were born.
Back then it was widely believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible.
From our post:
Smoking is so common and familiar that it can be hard to grasp just how large the impact is.
Every year, around 8 million people die prematurely from smoking.
But we have already made progress against smoking, and it is a fight we can win.
Read more:
Emissions of substances that deplete the ozone layer have fallen by more than 99% since 1989
Today's data insight is by
@EOrtizOspina
.
You can find all of our Data Insights on their dedicated feed:
The share of people living on less than $30 per day, adjusted for the price level in the country.
From
@MaxCRoser
's introductory post on global poverty
Coal dominated Europe's electricity mix over the 20th century, but it is quickly dying in many countries in the 21st.
The chart shows the share of electricity that comes from coal for a range of countries in Western Europe. The data comes from
@EmberClimate
.
Transitioning away