The media claims we are experiencing a ‘loneliness epidemic’. What is the evidence for this?

In countries such as Denmark and Switzerland, it is very common for people to live alone; but contrary to what many believe, this does not translate into higher loneliness. Loneliness and aloneness are not the same.

One-person households are becoming increasingly common across the world. In this post we explore the data behind this trend.

38 million people had HIV/AIDS in 2018. A couple of decades ago, the chances of surviving more than ten years with HIV were slim. Today, thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), people with HIV/AIDS can expect to live long lives. How many lives has ART saved?

We’ve just updated all available data on the 232 indicators of our UN Sustainable Development Goals Tracker (SDG-Tracker).

Social connections matter for economic outcomes. Personal relations, even those that we maintain for non-economic reasons, often give us access to information and provide us with social collateral for economic transactions

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. More than three-quarters of this is used for livestock production, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world’s protein and calorie supply.

Social networks facilitate the diffusion of ideas across individuals and firms, and because of this, they play an important role in productivity growth. In this post we explain how this works.

One-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture. What are the main contributors to food’s emissions?

Feeding the world whilst reducing food’s impact on the environment is one of our greatest challenges in the coming decades. What are food’s environmental impacts?

CO2 emissions are typically measured in terms of ‘production’. But how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade? Which countries export the most CO2 and which offshore their emissions?

There are large inequalities in the carbon footprint of people across the world. How do countries across the world compare? Where in the world do people emit the most CO2?

Which countries emit the most CO2 today? How do annual emissions vary across the world?

There’s not only significant variability in how much CO2 countries emit across the world today. There are also large differences in how much each has emitted in the past. Who has contributed most to global CO2 since 1750?

Our World in Data has been a project many years in the making. Here we detail the history of how the project got started, its evolution over the years and where we are today as a team.

At Our World in Data we present data and research – across more than 3000 charts – on the world’s largest problems. But some metrics are core to our work: here we present 12 that are key to understanding the state of the world.

An estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic enter our oceans each year. But the plastic we find in our surface waters is more than 100-fold lower. This is the ‘missing plastic’ problem. So, where does our plastic accumulate in the ocean and what does this mean for the future?

Maternal mortality was much more common in the past. Today, the number of women that die in childbirth is much lower, but there are still large inequalities across the world. If we can make maternal deaths as rare as they are in the healthiest countries we can save almost 300,000 mothers each year.

The world needs ideas and innovation to make progress against the many problems we face. Creative and talented people that can contribute to this important work are everywhere, but the opportunity to develop is limited to only a small number of well-off children. As a consequence of this, we all – the entire world population – are missing out on the creativity and innovations that would enrich our world and help us move forward.