Seasonal influenza is sometimes seen as a mild illness, but it remains a major cause of death. In serious cases, it can cause deadly complications such as pneumonia, strokes, and heart attacks. Researchers estimate that the flu causes about 400,000 respiratory deaths and 300,000 cardiovascular deaths globally each year.

The flu is most dangerous for infants and older adults. The map here shows rates of respiratory deaths caused by the flu in adults aged 65 and over, averaged across 2002–2011 (excluding the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic).

The data shows that death rates tend to be higher in South America, Africa, and South Asia than in Europe or North America.

I come from South America, and I found this surprising: most of what I hear about flu deaths tends to come from richer countries in the Northern Hemisphere. But the map shows that the flu is also deadly, in some cases even more so, in other regions where poverty, worse underlying health, limited access to healthcare, and lower vaccination coverage contribute to higher mortality.

One explanation for my misperception might be that surveillance and reporting are stronger in the countries that I associate with deaths from flu. Another could also be age differences: people in high-income countries tend to be older, so their total number of deaths — the ones you actually hear about — may still be higher, even if rates are lower.

When you consider the total death toll, you realize that the numbers are very large on the whole. Recall that the map only includes respiratory deaths, so the overall mortality is actually higher if we include other flu-related complications like cardiovascular disease.

Even if you account for the uncertainty of estimates in low-income countries — due to limited testing and death registration — the overall pattern remains striking: seasonal influenza kills hundreds of thousands each year, with many of these deaths in South America, Africa, and South Asia.

Measuring happiness is difficult, but one way to understand how satisfied people are with their lives is to simply ask them.

Self-reported life satisfaction is one key metric that researchers often rely on. It asks people to imagine a hypothetical ladder, where the best possible life for them is a 10, and the worst possible life is a 0. They then have to place their current position on the ladder.

The chart shows the three-year average scores from 2022 to 2024 for the four countries with the highest ratings and the four with the lowest.

Afghans reported the lowest life satisfaction in the world, far below any other country.

This incredibly low score has been replicated in other studies. Researchers recently compared Afghans’ life satisfaction with international datasets dating back to 1946 and found it was the lowest ever recorded. Two-thirds gave a score of 0 or 1 on the 10-point scale.

Women are much more likely than men to be killed by their intimate partner. The chart shows this across nine OECD countries in 2023.

These deaths are rarely isolated events. Research shows that partner homicides are usually the endpoint of a long pattern of coercive control — behaviors such as surveillance, isolation, intimidation, restrictions on daily life, and physical violence.

Recognizing both the gender imbalance and its roots in coercive control can help focus support services, encourage family and friends to act sooner, and increase social pressure against abusive behavior.

While women face the highest risk from intimate partners, men make up about 80% of homicide victims globally. The gender split in partner homicides is therefore a striking exception.

This chart shows global GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation. Looking at the world economy from this perspective, it is the steadiness of this change that stands out to me. Average incomes per person have risen at a fairly constant pace of roughly 2% per year, interrupted only by the 2008–09 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic.

One reason this is noteworthy, in my view, is that national economies changed a lot during the same period. Some economies slowed, many others grew, and more generally, some major political shifts took place. Yet when all of this is aggregated, the global average followed a remarkably smooth upward track.

The line in the chart ends in 2024, so it does not yet capture more recent developments. But a few recent articles, such as this one from The Economist, look at data for 2025 and point to the same stability.

Past trends may not continue in the future. But this data reminds us that global economic aggregates can develop more steadily than the headlines might make us think.

In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.

To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO₂, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO₂.)

In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO₂ the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.

To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO₂ that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.

At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.

The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.

Have global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions gone up or down this year?

The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.

Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.

They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.

This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.

While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.

Roads in rich countries tend to be much safer than those in low- and middle-income countries. Cars are more modern, infrastructure is better, and driving laws are stricter and better enforced.

However, there are still huge differences between high-income countries. This is obvious from the chart, which shows death rates from road injuries across various countries. Rates can vary more than 20-fold.

I was recently surprised to find that my country, the United Kingdom, has some of the safest roads in the world, alongside Sweden, Singapore, and Norway. It can be easy to complain about the situation in our own country without considering what things are like elsewhere.

Road deaths are incredibly high in several Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. These countries tend to have far more high-speed highways, drivers often cover much longer distances, and the enforcement of regulations such as speed limits, seatbelt use, and driving distractions is weaker. These countries have reduced fatality rates in recent years, but still have much higher death tolls than other rich countries.

What difference does it make when people can choose their leaders? One area where the right to vote for political leaders may matter is corruption.

Democracy and corruption are hard to measure. One possible way to understand how countries perform on these fronts is to ask experts who study them closely. These expert judgments aren’t perfect, but we think they’re useful.

The V-Dem project surveys experts to assess how democratic each country is. Are elections free and fair? Do all citizens have equal voting rights? Are fundamental freedoms — like speech and assembly — respected? Experts also rate how frequent corruption is in public institutions, from bribery and embezzlement to whether laws are enforced fairly.

This chart combines these expert estimates: democracy on the horizontal axis and corruption on the vertical axis, with both scores on a scale from 0 to 1.

There are four corners in the chart. In the top left, you find many countries that are both autocratic and corrupt, such as Myanmar and Russia. In the bottom right, there’s a thick cluster of nations that have stronger democratic institutions and lower levels of corruption. What also stands out is that no country appears in the top right: none are rated as both having strong democratic institutions and being highly corrupt.

This chart shows correlation, not causation — but research on the causal link suggests democratic systems can indeed help expose and reduce corruption. And there is also a causal impact running the other way: corruption can weaken democratic institutions, for instance by lowering voter turnout.

The deaths of children are daily tragedies on an enormous scale. The UN estimates that between 1950 and 2024, 990 million children died. That’s almost a billion children who died in only 75 years.

The chart shows that the world has made progress. In 1950, 23% of children born died before they were five years old. Since then, the global child mortality rate has declined to 3.6%.

In absolute terms, the number of child deaths has also declined: in 1950, 20 million children died; by the year 2000, this number had halved; and since then, it has halved again.

But the deaths of millions of young children every year remain one of the worst problems in the world and deserve much more attention.

It’s a common misconception that life expectancy has increased only because fewer children die. Historical mortality records show that adults today also live much longer than adults in the past.

It’s true that child mortality rates were much higher in the past, and their decline has greatly improved overall life expectancy. But in recent decades, improvements in survival at older ages have been even more important.

The chart shows the period life expectancy in France for people of different ages. This measures how long someone at each of those ages would live, on average, if they experienced the death rates recorded in that year. For example, the last point on the top dark-red line shows that an 80-year-old in 2023 could expect to live to about 90, assuming mortality rates stayed as they were in 2023.

As you can see, life expectancy in France has risen at every age. In 1816, someone who had reached the age of 10 could expect to live to 57. By 2023, this had increased to 84. For those aged 65, it rose from 76 in 1816, to 87 in 2023.

The data for many other countries shows the same. This remarkable shift is the result of advances in medicine, public health, and living standards.

The world has made major progress in expanding access to education. A century ago, most children did not have the option to go to school at all. Today, access to education is widely seen as a basic right that governments are expected to provide. And most governments succeed — according to statistics compiled by UNESCO, about 9 in 10 children of primary school age are enrolled.

The chart shows how this expansion unfolded for boys and girls separately. Throughout most of the 20th century, enrollment rose steadily, but boys remained more likely to be in school than girls. It was only towards the end of the century that this gap began to close. Today, the gap is small: around 91% of boys and 89% of girls are enrolled in primary school.

While the gap is small globally, it remains large and persistent in some countries. In Chad, in Central Africa, about 80% of boys are enrolled in primary school, compared with 67% of girls. This difference has shown little change in recent years, as the data linked below shows.