Global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017

Unsafe sanitation is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. It increases the risk of many fatal diseases, including cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio.

Unfortunately, over 40% of the world does not have access to safe sanitation facilities. This is based on estimates from the WHO/UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene.

The chart shows the share of the global population that has access to safe sanitation over time. While rates have increased, particularly over the last decade, they still fall far short of the UN’s target of universal access in 2030.

Increasing access to safe sanitation would save many lives from preventable infectious diseases.

Lung cancer kills more than two million people every year, making it the most fatal cancer globally.

While a number of factors increase the risk, the 20th century brought one like no other: smoking.

There is now plenty of epidemiological evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, but we can also see it in the patterns of death over decades. The chart shows death rates from lung, trachea, and bronchus cancers among men in a selection of high-income countries. Each shows a very clear rise and fall over the late 20th century.

This pattern mirrors smoking rates, with a lag. The timing and height of each peak depend on when and how strongly smoking took hold: early in the United Kingdom, later in Japan.

You also see this rise and fall among women, shifted later, since they took up smoking after men did.

Today, most smokers live in low- and middle-income countries, who are at different stages of this curve. Helping people quit or preventing them from starting in the first place would save many lives for decades to come.

Effective waste management systems are something that many of us living in high-income countries take for granted. Our waste is collected from bins in our street and taken to controlled or sanitary landfills, incinerators, or recycling centers.

But in many low- and middle-income countries, this is not the case.

In some of them, less than half of the waste (from households, shops, and other sources) is collected by management services at all.

In many countries, even when waste is collected, most of it — sometimes over 80% — is taken to open dumps or is openly burned. You can see this in the chart.

Both methods cause pollution, either through waste leaking from open dumps or toxic air pollution generated when plastics and other materials are burned.

While these numbers show that huge amounts of the world’s waste are mismanaged, they also tell a story of opportunity. Countries that invest in waste management can do so effectively, so that very little waste pollutes the environment, and the air is far cleaner.

Coffee is part of daily life for millions of people around the world. It’s also a key source of income and employment in many countries. In this chart, I want to focus on the shift in where it is grown over the last six decades.

The chart shows the breakdown of global green coffee bean production by region, from 1961 to 2024. Green coffee beans are those that haven’t yet been roasted.

South America has been the largest producing region throughout this period, but its share of global output has fallen, as has Africa’s. The biggest story is the growth of coffee production in Asia: it went from producing less than 5% of the world’s coffee in the early 1960s to about 32% today.

Much of Asia’s growth comes from Vietnam, where production rose from around 5,000 tonnes in the early 1980s to about 2 million tonnes today. It now produces more than all African countries combined.

This expansion was driven largely by the spread of Robusta, a hardier and higher-yielding variety than Arabica, which is the type that dominates Latin American production.

Brazil is the world’s largest producer, while Vietnam is now second. Colombia used to be in that position, but Vietnam overtook it in 1999.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) just published its latest annual Global EV Outlook. It provides estimates for electric vehicle sales in 2025.

One in four (25%) cars sold in 2025 were electric, more than double the share from just four years earlier.

But there are large differences in adoption rates across the world. This chart shows new sales shares by country. In Norway, almost every new car is an electric one. In China, more than half are, while in the United States, it’s just 10%.

These figures include fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. You can find this data broken down by vehicle type in this chart.

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year.

Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan's level.

Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.

Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.

According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan's total population.

The World Bank's latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country's recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.