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How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States?

To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States.

The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then.

However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.

What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population?

The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout.

This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third.

This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.

This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

Explore this trend in other countries →

Around the world, 10 cows, 47 pigs, and 2,400 chickens get killed for meat every second.

Recent estimates suggest that 99% of livestock in the United States is factory-farmed. Globally, the majority of animals are raised on factory farms.

For many of these animals, life is short and painful.

Newborn calves are typically taken from their mothers shortly after birth, causing distress for both. Castrating and cutting off piglets' tails without anesthesia is common practice. Chickens grow so quickly that after six weeks, many struggle to stand for long and spend most of their time lying down. These animals require high doses of antibiotics to survive in poor living conditions.

There are ways to make life less harsh for farm animals. Reducing meat consumption can lessen the demand for factory farming and its associated harms. Moreover, slowing chicken growth rates or giving hens better living spaces can help reduce their suffering.

These figures are based on estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Explore many more charts in our Animal Welfare Explorer →

Cancer is one of the most common causes of death worldwide. In several countries, it is the most common cause of death.

But which cancer types cause the most deaths?

The map presents the most common type of cancer death among men. This is based on the cause listed on death certificates, compiled by the WHO Mortality Database. Unfortunately, many countries are not shown as they lack sufficient death registration.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of male cancer deaths in many countries, primarily driven by smoking.

In parts of Latin America, prostate cancer leads. Although it has high survival rates in richer countries, it is common and can reach late stages before diagnosis, which limits treatment options.

Stomach cancer — shown in purple on the map — is the leading cause in several Central Asian countries. It is primarily caused by H. pylori infections. In wealthier countries, infections have declined thanks to better food safety, hygiene, and antibiotics.

Liver cancer, leading in Mongolia, Thailand, and Egypt, is often the result of inflammation caused by long-term alcohol consumption or hepatitis virus infection.

Learn more about the rates of different cancers and how they have changed over time →

The chart shows the share of children at the end of lower-secondary school age — aged 12 to 15 — who meet the minimum proficiency set by UNESCO in reading comprehension. This means they can connect the main ideas across various texts, understand the author’s intentions, and draw reasoned conclusions.

Only around half of children of this age can read this well. In countries like Ireland and South Korea, more than 8 in 10 children reach this level. But in poorer countries like Senegal, Zambia, and Cambodia, fewer than 1 in 20 do.

These numbers include all children of middle school age, not just those who attend school.

Explore the most recent education data from UNESCO, now available in our updated charts →

To tackle climate change, the world needs to rapidly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But before we reduce emissions, we need to stop them rising; the world needs to pass the peak.

Globally, total CO2 emissions are still slowly increasing. The Global Carbon Project just released its preliminary estimates for 2024, which suggest another 0.8% increase.

However, while total emissions have not yet peaked, emissions per person have. Globally, per capita CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels peaked in 2012. When land use emissions — which are more uncertain and noisier — are included, they peaked in the 1970s and have fluctuated since then. You can see both trends in the chart.

This suggests that, globally, lifestyles are slowly decarbonizing. However, to come closer to our global climate targets, economies must decarbonize much faster to push total emissions into decline.

Explore the latest CO2 emissions data in our updated charts →

Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children.

The chart shows the number of lives saved by different childhood vaccines in the last 50 years. These estimates come from Andrew Shattock and colleagues and are based on global data on diseases, causes of death, vaccination rates, and vaccine efficacy.

Measles vaccines rank the highest in the total number of lives saved.

Measles is especially contagious and deadly. The virus depletes immune cells, making it harder to fight off measles and making other infections much more life-threatening. It can also erase immune memory to infections and vaccines that children have already encountered.

Before vaccines, almost all children caught measles, and it was a common cause of disability and death. With high measles vaccination rates, millions of lives are saved globally each year.

Read more in our article about the impact of global vaccination →

Today, Africa is home to 1.5 billion people. By 2070, the UN expects this number to more than double. Its estimates range from 2.7 billion to 3.7 billion, with the most likely scenario placing the African population around 3.2 billion.

This region is where most of the growth in the world population will occur in the next 50 years.

Europe’s population is already shrinking, with Asia and Latin America expected to follow from the 2050s onwards. The UN expects North America’s population to grow, although much slower than Africa's.

Read more about population growth →

Economic growth is most important for the world's poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest live on the African continent. Are Africa’s economies growing?

The picture is mixed. In some countries, incomes have unfortunately declined in the last decades. This includes Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. I have written about this in my brief explainer on extreme poverty.

In today’s Daily Data Insight, I want to focus on the other side: I want to highlight the African countries that are achieving economic growth. Nine of them are shown in the chart above.

In all nine countries, people’s average incomes have more than doubled since 1990.

This made substantial improvements in living standards possible: the share of people in extreme poverty and the rate of child mortality declined in all nine countries.

If you want to know more about the importance of growth and how it can be measured, you could read my article: What is economic growth? And why is it so important? →

The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, was established in 2003 to fight the global HIV epidemic.

Since its launch, PEPFAR has provided millions of people with antiretroviral therapy (ART) worldwide, especially in Africa.

The chart shows the number of people who received therapy through PEPFAR in a given year. In 2023, it was 20.5 million people.

ART is highly effective: it helps keep people with HIV healthy and reduces the risk of spreading the virus to others, saving more than one million lives each year.

But, after months of legislative delay, PEPFAR was recently renewed for only one year, raising concerns about the program's future after March 2025.

Explore data on other aid success stories →

In today’s Data Insight, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at a part of our work we rarely talk about, but that is crucial in contributing to a more accurate understanding of the world.

We work with hundreds of datasets from many different sources. To check their quality, we’ve built in-house tools that flag unusual patterns, helping us spot when something seems off. Even in high-quality datasets, occasional errors can slip through.

The chart shows a recent example: after we updated a dataset, we noticed an unexpected spike in one of its time series. Investigating further, we traced the issue back to the data provider and let them know. They reviewed it, confirmed the problem, and corrected the error. Thanks to exchanges like this, several datasets have been improved this year.

Improving data quality is always a collaborative effort. We deeply appreciate the work of statisticians and data providers worldwide, who play a critical role in creating and maintaining these datasets. Our role is to help flag issues when we spot them and provide constructive feedback to make the data better for everyone.

For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people.

Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it.

This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased.

The increase in global agricultural output was crucial for the reduction of hunger and famines that the world achieved in this period. Whether or not we will be able to end hunger globally will depend on whether this increase in food production will continue.

Explore global and country-specific data on a wide range of foods in our Food Data Explorer →

Around 90% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions come from fossil fuels and industrial processes such as cement production. The other 10% comes from land use change, primarily carbon released from trees and vegetation due to deforestation.

Fossil fuels are also the biggest source of emissions at the national level in most countries across the world. But there are a few exceptions.

In the chart, you can see the share of emissions from fossil fuels compared to land use change across a small selection of countries. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, fossil fuels dominate. This data comes from the Global Carbon Project.

However, in Brazil, land use change plays a much more significant role. This is for two reasons. First, deforestation rates are higher than in most other countries. Second, Brazil has a very clean power grid. Most of its electricity comes from hydropower, with solar and wind also growing quickly. It burns very little coal and gas.

Explore data on how emissions compare across the world and by source →

The United States is the world’s largest oil producer.

The chart shows annual production by country from 1990 to 2023. The US has been the largest producer for the last seven years.

Production in the US gradually declined during the 1990s and early 2000s but increased steeply again post-2010 and is now at an all-time high.

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

Explore oil production data for more countries and further back in time →

European neighbors Portugal and Spain are currently neck-and-neck in the race to roll out solar and wind power.

On the chart, you can see the share of electricity from the combination of solar and wind in each country. Their rate of progress has been very similar.

In 2023, both countries generated around 40% of their electricity from these sources. Wind power is more prevalent in Portugal, while solar is more used in Spain.

This data comes from Ember.

Explore more data on the rollout of clean energy across the world →

There are two key drivers of sea level rise. First, water expands as it gets warmer. Second, ice on land — in the form of ice sheets and glaciers — melts and adds water to ocean basins.

Both of these processes have accelerated due to climate change. The effect is shown in the chart, based on data from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It combines two sources: recent data from the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center and a publication from Church and White (2011).

On this chart, the rise in sea level is measured relative to the average from 1993 to 2008. Levels had risen by almost 20 centimeters between 1880 and this period, and 5 more centimeters since. Combined, that’s around 25 centimeters.

Explore more data on the impacts of climate change →