A long-term perspective on humanity’s battle against malaria

Many of us will have seen the stark images of plastic in the ocean: bottles and wrappers clumped together, or rubbish trapped along the coastline. But how much of the world’s plastic waste ends up in the ocean?

In 2020, Gapminder asked people in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the UK this question. They had three options to choose from:

• A) Less than 1%
• B) Less than 36%
• C) Less than 66%

Almost nine in ten people picked B or C, thinking it was more than one-third.

The correct answer was A: around 0.5% of plastic waste ends up in the ocean.

The chart shows how the OECD gets to this number. Globally, we produce around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste a year. Most of this is managed responsibly, either in secure landfills, through recycling, or incineration. But around one-quarter of it is mismanaged or littered.

From there, a decreasing fraction of plastic waste leaks to the environment, then into rivers and coastlines, and finally into the ocean. Around 1.7 million tonnes end up there: around 0.5% of what was generated in the first place.

People tend to think that most of our plastic ends up there, but only a tiny percentage does. This should make plastic pollution an easier problem to solve: we already know how to manage most of it well. The challenge is to ensure that all plastic is handled this way.

The new Living Planet Index report has just been published. It estimates an average decline of 73% in studied wildlife populations since 1970. You can see this in the chart.

Every two years, it hits the headlines, and I always have mixed feelings about it.

I love that biodiversity loss gets its rare spot in the limelight. It’s a problem that I think doesn’t get enough attention. The trouble is that journalists often report it incorrectly: either as the number of animals or wildlife lost, the number of species in decline, or the number that have gone extinct.

But it tells us none of that.

It examines changes across nearly 36,000 animal populations and reports the average change. This gets even more complicated because it’s based on a geometric mean, and populations get weighted differently in the final index.

When we look a bit deeper, we see that not all populations are doing poorly. As shown in the chart, around half have declined, while the other half have either increased in abundance or remained stable.

As I explained in a previous article, being able to identify which of these populations is doing particularly badly is crucial if we’re to focus our conservation efforts on where they’re needed most.

In 1950, almost one in four children worldwide died before their fifth birthday. In Africa, one in three children died.

The chart shows the change since then. In every region, the mortality rate of children has declined.

In Africa and Oceania, the child mortality rate declined 5-fold, in Asia 10-fold, and in Europe about 27-fold.

Progress was not always steady. The sharp spike in Asia around 1960 was due to the “Great Leap Forward” famine in Mao’s China, the deadliest famine in recorded history.

And the progress is far from finished. The global average has declined to 3.5%, but this still means that about 4.7 million children younger than five years died in 2025 — 13,000 children every single day.

Globally, electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century.

In the United Kingdom, things have moved in the opposite direction. Its generation per person peaked in 2003 and has fallen by more than a third since then.

You can see this in the chart, which shows generation per person since 1920. Today, levels are back to where they were in the late 1960s.

Some of that decline is a change in electricity imports, rather than demand: net imports have increased from 1% of electricity demand in 2010 to 9% in 2025. But it’s still true that the UK consumes much less electricity than it used to.

The most common explanation is deindustrialization: as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, electricity demand fell. That’s part of the explanation, but far from all of it.

Sectoral data from the International Energy Agency confirms that electricity consumption in industry has fallen by one-quarter since 2005 (more if we calculate this per person). But residential and commercial electricity use has fallen by just as much.

Deindustrialization has reduced demand, but improvements in energy efficiency — such as the shift from incandescent to LED lightbulbs and the introduction of efficiency standards for appliances — have played an important role too.

The median age of a country or region is the age that divides its population into two equal parts: half of the people are older, and half are younger. As the population ages, the median age rises.

That’s what this chart tracks. It shows how the median age has changed across world regions from 2000 to 2023, the most recent year for which the UN publishes estimates.

The first thing that stands out is perhaps the least surprising: some regions have much older populations than others. Africa is very young: half of its population is younger than 19. Europe is much older: half of its population is over 42.

But there’s a second point that I think receives less attention in public discussions: how quickly this is changing. Of the six world regions, Latin America is where the median age has increased the most since 2000. It rose by a third, from 23 to 31 years, in a bit less than a generation.

Europe’s population is older, but the median age has been rising more quickly in Latin America this century. That’s largely due to fertility falling later and faster in the latter.