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The world started adding lead to gasoline in the 1920s. It improved vehicle efficiency and engine performance. However, lead has proven to be a toxic pollutant, particularly for children. Using it in gasoline pollutes the air in cities worldwide, significantly impacting human health.

It took a long time for countries to start taking action. In 1986, Japan became the first country to ban leaded gasoline in cars completely. You can see this on the first map of the timelapse: at the time, leaded gasoline was still in use everywhere else. Since then, bans have been rolled out across the world.

Three and a half decades later, in 2021, Algeria became the last country to ban it. Leaded gasoline is now banned from being used in road vehicles in every country. It is a big win for the health of people around the world.

Read more on how the world eliminated lead from gasoline →

Homicide rates in Europe surged in the second half of the twentieth century but have dropped over the last 30 years.

The chart shows the rates for several European countries based on data from the WHO Mortality Database.

You can see that this trend was most pronounced in Italy. Homicide rates more than doubled from less than 1 per 100,000 people in the late 1960s to more than 2 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, rates have even fallen below earlier levels.

This rise and fall in homicides is relatively consistent across other European countries, although the timing and magnitude of these changes differ. France, for example, saw a wave of homicides in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Explore this data country by country →

Data on mental health is neglected or unavailable in many countries, especially in Africa and Asia.

The map shows which countries have reported recent data on mental health in the population and how they have reported them. This is based on surveys conducted for the World Health Organization’s Mental Health Atlas (2023).

Several countries have not compiled mental health data in recent years, as shown in red.

Other countries have compiled recent data, but only for general statistical purposes — without using it in specific reports to inform policy, planning, or management purposes. These countries are shown in light green.

Without regular data, it’s difficult to track whether progress is being made or if new problems are emerging and guide resources to address mental health issues.

This means many people’s difficulties with mental health can go unnoticed and unaddressed.

Read more on how researchers study the prevalence of mental illnesses →

The Internet is one of the world’s fastest-growing technologies.

In 2010, just 30% of the global population was online. Within a decade, this figure had doubled to 60% in 2020. And it’s still growing rapidly, as the chart shows.

There are, however, large inequalities. In North America and Europe, more than 80% are online, compared to just 30% in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The quality of this access is also very different: this indicator is based on someone having used the Internet at least once in the last three months. The experience of someone having non-stop connections on their smartphone will be very different from someone logging on in a public space once a month.

But the dominant trend globally — and across all regions — is that more people are coming online every year. It’s a technology that’s moving incredibly fast.

Explore the data →

Free time is important to most people around the world.

As shown on this chart, in many countries, leisure is important to more than 80% of people. This is based on data from the European Values Study and World Values Survey.

However, the percentage of people who find leisure “very important” varies more. In some countries, it is the majority; in others, it is less than a quarter.

People enjoy their free time, but valuing leisure a lot doesn’t mean people value work less or work fewer hours. In countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, and Indonesia, people put a high value on both these aspects of their lives.

Explore this data →

The death rate from malaria has gradually decreased since 2004, but disruption to healthcare programs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden increase in death rates in 2020 and 2021.

According to the latest Global Burden of Disease Study — published earlier this year by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) — the age-standardized death rate from malaria was 14.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2004 and had fallen by almost 40% in 2019, to 9.3 deaths per 100,000.

However, in 2020, it increased by around 12% to 10.3 deaths per 100,000, equivalent to around 80,000 additional deaths. Estimates from the World Health Organization also show a similar increase.

This increase is largely attributed to disruptions in malaria prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The increase was most noticeable in Africa, where IHME estimates that around 95% of malaria deaths occur.

Explore this data →

The world has seen big gains in life expectancy in recent decades, yet the United States increasingly lags behind peer countries.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the period life expectancy in the US was two years lower than the average for high-income countries, according to data from the UN World Population Prospects.

Healthcare spending as a share of GDP is much higher in the United States than in peer nations. This raises questions about equality in access to care, affordability, and the overall efficiency of the US healthcare system.

Other lifestyle and societal factors are also likely to play a role: the US, for example, has seen a surge in drug-related deaths in recent years as a result of the opioid crisis.

Read more on healthcare spending →

According to the most recent data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, India now consumes more coal than the continents of Europe and North America combined.

The chart shows this was not the case until recently. Coal consumption in Europe and North America was high for a long time but has significantly decreased in recent decades. At the same time, India’s consumption has steadily increased.

India has industrialized and is growing rapidly. It has a huge demand for cheap energy, and the country’s abundant coal reserves are being used to meet it.

On a per-capita basis, coal consumption in India has only just passed levels in either region. That’s after centuries of higher consumption in North America and Europe.

Explore our detailed data on energy production and sources, country by country →

In many countries, there are large differences in voter turnout between young and older people. The chart shows the data for recent national elections in four countries.

In the 2022 French elections, 76% of those aged 18–24 voted, while 92% of people aged 50–59 did — a difference of 16 percentage points.

We see the same pattern in the UK and the US. Only slightly more than half of young people voted in their 2019 and 2020 elections, while around three out of four older people did.

This data comes from post-election surveys by Insee, the British Election Study, the US Census Bureau, and the Federal Returning Officer of Germany.

Explore more data on voter turnout around the world →

Death rates from illicit drugs are the highest in the United States. This is largely the result of a steep rise in opioid deaths in recent years.

This map shows death rates from opioid overdoses, measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people in each country’s population. This data comes from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s latest Global Burden of Disease study.

In 2021, the United States had, by far, the highest death rate from opioids, with 15.4 deaths per 100,000 people each year. Second behind it was Canada, with 6.9 deaths per 100,000. Several European countries and Russia counted between 3 and 4 deaths per 100,000.

This is not only the case for opioids: the US also has the highest death rate from amphetamine and cocaine overdoses.

Explore this data by country and over time →

Energy demand in China has increased rapidly over the last few decades due to rising incomes and industrialization.

The country now uses about the same amount of energy per person as the European Union. You can see this in this chart, with new data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.

This measure of primary energy is based on the substitution method, which tries to account for the inefficiencies of fossil fuels compared to renewables.

Note that this does not account for energy embedded in traded goods, so some of this increase in China has come from producing goods exported to other countries.

We have just updated our energy data based on the latest release →

While some countries have granted more rights to LGBT+ people, others are moving in the opposite direction.

The chart, based on data from researcher Kristopher Velasco, shows that five countries had an explicit ban on same-sex marriage in 1991. Their laws did not just say nothing about same-sex marriage; they had laws that made it explicitly illegal.

By 2019, this number had increased to 37 countries, concentrated in Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

These marriage bans have happened while a similar number of countries have legalized same-sex marriage.

In this way, LGBT+ rights have become more polarized: some countries have introduced progressive laws, while others have become more regressive.

Read more in our new article on LGBT+ rights →

Most of the world's poorest people still rely on solid fuels — such as crop waste, dung, wood, and charcoal — for cooking and heating.

These fuels cause damaging air pollution in households when they’re burned.

According to estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, indoor air pollution prematurely kills more than three million people each year.

As shown on the chart, deaths from indoor pollution are falling as more people get access to cleaner cooking fuels. Improving access to clean energy could prevent many more early deaths.

Explore this data →

This chart shows the amount of annual funding for research and development (R&D) to understand, treat, and develop technologies against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). This data comes from Policy Cures Research’s G-FINDER project.

Less than $100 million is spent on R&D for most NTDs, despite millions of people being affected by these diseases —  which include dengue, leishmaniasis, and trachoma.

Without funding, it’s very difficult to develop new medicines, vaccines, and technologies to reduce suffering and disability for the millions of people affected by these diseases.

We know that effective funding works. Large public health initiatives have helped fund research against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and COVID-19 and have saved millions of lives.

Explore the data →

How satisfied are people with their lives? Answering this question can give us important insights into what matters to people and the circumstances that lead to a fulfilled life.

The World Happiness Report has published data on life satisfaction — based on the Gallup World Poll — since 2012 and covers more than 140 countries worldwide. We have just updated our charts with the latest data.

It measures life satisfaction by asking people to rate their lives on a ladder from 0 to 10, where their worst possible life is 0 and their best possible life is 10.

The resulting score is averaged over the last three years to focus on longer-term shifts.

Despite drastic experiences like the COVID-19 pandemic, overall life satisfaction remains remarkably consistent globally. We can also observe correlations with other measures of well-being: healthier and richer countries tend to have higher average life satisfaction scores.

Explore our data on happiness and life satisfaction →

According to the latest Global Burden of Disease Study — published last month by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) — COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in 2021, after cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

These estimates suggest that COVID-19 was responsible for around eight million deaths in 2021. In many countries across South America and sub-Saharan Africa, the IHME reports that it was the leading cause of death.

Global improvements in healthcare have led to a steady reduction in the death rate from infectious diseases in recent decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed this trend.

Explore this data →