Public social spending has increased very substantially in the 20th century

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.

When people think about global oil, their minds often go toward countries in the Middle East.

But it’s the United States that is the world’s largest oil producer.

The chart shows oil production by country since 1990. As you can see, the US has been the largest producer for the last nine years, since it overtook Saudi Arabia.

Production in the US gradually declined during the 1990s and early 2000s, then increased sharply after 2010 and is now at an all-time high.

This data comes from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.

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.