Today
In 2025, the amount of foreign aid given by the world’s richest countries fell by almost a quarter. That amounted to a reduction of roughly US$50 billion.
Aid cuts in the United States — and the shutdown of its agency for international development, USAID — got the most attention, and for good reason: the US is the world’s largest aid donor in dollar terms, so its contributions make a huge difference to the global total.
But many other countries cut their aid contributions, too. In the chart, you can see the change among the largest 10 donors (in dollar terms) from 2024 to 2025. This is given as a share of their gross national income.
Contributions fell in eight of the ten countries. Only Sweden and Italy increased their budgets.
The countries shown are the largest donors in dollar terms; some others not shown contribute far more in relative terms: Norway, for example, was the only country to give more than 1% of its national income to foreign aid.
September 24
If your job was to sell cars in Turkey in 2022, selling an electric one would be an unusual day at work. Just one new car out of every 100 sales was electric.
By 2025, this had become a fairly normal day. More than one in five new cars were electric — a more than 20-fold increase in just three years. You can see this rapid takeoff in the chart.
Why did electric models become so popular? In 2023, the government introduced tax relief for electric cars, cutting the registration tax compared to petrol and diesel cars. This was timed to coincide with the launch of Turkey’s first domestic electric car manufacturer, Togg, which has quickly become the market leader. Imports of cheaper electric car models, including from China, have also made these markets more diverse and cost-competitive.
This combination of factors has made electric cars far more affordable than they were just a few years ago.
September 22
We are all surrounded by nickel. It’s one of the key ingredients in stainless steel, so most of us see it every day: from the pots we cook with, to the pipes in bathrooms, the batteries in mobile phones, and alloys in cars.
For nearly four decades, Indonesia — which has the world’s largest reserves — mined nickel but processed very little of it at home. This changed around a decade ago, when the government banned the export of raw nickel, forcing companies to process it domestically.
That’s the focus of the chart, which shows processed nickel production in tonnes among today’s largest producers.
Indonesia’s production increased more than 60-fold, going from around 22,000 tonnes in 2014 to over 1.4 million tonnes in 2023. The country went from producing 1% of the world’s total processed nickel to 41% in that period.
In 2021, Indonesia overtook China to become the world’s largest producer and is now far ahead. But much of that growth involved Chinese capital. The International Energy Agency reports that Chinese companies now own the vast majority of Indonesia’s nickel refining assets.
September 19
Over the last two decades, around 128 million hectares of forest have been cleared to make way for agriculture and forest plantations. That’s an area five times the size of the United Kingdom.
What has driven this deforestation?
A recent paper estimated the contribution of different agricultural products over the last few decades. In the chart, you can see the breakdown.
Beef production has been the largest driver by far, contributing over 40% of the total. This has mostly been the clearing of forest for grazing pasture, especially across Brazil and other countries in Latin America.
Oilseeds — mostly soy and oil palm — were the second-largest driver, again concentrated in Latin America for soy and in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil. While deforestation for palm oil was high in the early 2000s and 2010s, it has fallen a lot in recent years.
Forest plantations have been a large driver of deforestation in North America and East Asia. Deforestation for most other products — including cereals, roots and tubers, and cash crops like cocoa and coffee — has been concentrated in Africa, where yields have not grown quickly enough to offset rising demand.
September 17
Malaria was once endemic across much of the Caribbean. This map shows how much progress has been made: the islands in green are all malaria-free.
Some of these islands were certified by the WHO to have eliminated the disease decades ago. This requires, among other things, zero indigenous cases for three consecutive years. The list includes Grenada and Saint Lucia in 1962, Trinidad and Tobago in 1965, Dominica and Jamaica in 1966, and Cuba in 1973.
Others are on the WHO’s list of countries where malaria never existed, and those where it disappeared without a deliberate anti-malaria campaign.
At the center, you can see Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola. They are the Caribbean’s last island countries with endemic malaria.
The Dominican Republic is much closer to elimination — it reported around 1,200 locally acquired cases in 2024, compared with almost 38,600 in Haiti. But its success depends on Haiti’s too, because malaria doesn’t stop at the border. This is why malaria eradication needs coordinated efforts across countries.
September 15
Around one-fifth of adults in the world use tobacco. But large gaps often exist in smoking rates between genders.
Globally, around one-third of men use tobacco, while less than one in ten women do.
Men are more likely to use tobacco in almost every country in the world. You can see this on the chart, which plots the share of men (on the vertical axis) versus the share of women (on the horizontal axis). Nearly all countries lie above the diagonal line, which means more men do so.
This data is collated and published by the World Health Organization. It’s based on adults aged 15 years and older and includes all tobacco products. In most countries, smoking is the main form of tobacco use, but in some, smokeless or chewing tobacco is more common.
September 12
Around 1.5% of the world’s electricity was used for data centers in 2025. People are often surprised by how low this number is.
While data centers are a relatively small share of global electricity demand, this is not true everywhere. You can see the differences across several world regions in the chart.
The United States is home to the largest share of the world’s data centers. In 2025, they consumed around 5% of the country’s electricity.
But demand is even more localized than this. There are numerous states where data centers represent more than 10% of power demand. In Virginia, it’s over a quarter.
Even in Europe, this demand is very concentrated; beneath its 2% figure is Ireland, where data centers consume over 20% of electricity.
This local concentration of demand — combined with the speed at which AI is progressing — puts pressure on grids, even if electricity demand is not overwhelming at the global level.
