Today
For most of human history, more people were born each year than died. Populations grew very slowly for most of this history, then rapidly in recent centuries, as child mortality plummeted and people lived longer.
But this is changing. As the map shows, deaths now outnumber births in a growing number of countries across Europe and East Asia.
The balance of births and deaths tells us about a country’s “natural population change” — whether it would grow or shrink without any international migration. Where deaths outnumber births, the population will shrink unless enough people move in from abroad to make up the gap.
June 6
Coal generates one-third of the world’s electricity, more than any other source.
But zoom into the country level, and the picture is much more varied. The map shows which source generated the most power in each country in 2024 or 2025 (the latest year available).
Thanks to large reserves, coal dominates across Asia. It’s the largest source in China, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. These are huge power producers, which is why coal is so dominant at a global level.
Across most other regions, it’s mostly a mix of gas and hydropower. On islands and parts of North Africa, it’s oil.
Europe has the most diverse mix, with nuclear power dominating generation in countries such as France and Finland, and solar and wind overtaking fossil fuels as the largest sources in countries such as Spain and Germany.
Solar and wind are growing quickly in many countries; when these sources are combined as “variable renewables”, they become the largest source in six more countries: the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Pakistan.
June 4
At the turn of the millennium, Australia got more than 80% of its electricity from coal. This has dropped to less than 45%.
The chart shows how the country’s electricity mix has changed in recent decades.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, coal was initially replaced by gas, with only moderate growth in solar and wind. But in the last five years, solar and wind have been deployed much more quickly. Gas is now on the decline, too. In 2023, solar overtook gas to become Australia’s second-largest electricity source.
While coal is declining, it still supplies much more of Australia’s power than most high-income countries.
June 2
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.
May 30
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.
May 28
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.
May 26
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.
