Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, written by our team.
Global population growth peaked six decades ago
The increase in the world’s population is not exponential. The global population is growing, but the growth rate has declined since its peak six decades ago.
The chart shows the annual rate of global population growth according to historical estimates and projections from the UN World Population Prospects.
The growth rate peaked in 1963 at over 2% per year, and since then, it has more than halved, falling to less than 1% by 2020.
The UN demographers expect rates to continue falling until the end of the century, eventually leading to negative growth rates and a shrinking global population.
Drug-resistant tuberculosis is much more expensive to treat
Tuberculosis is usually treatable with a specific combination of antibiotics. However, without proper treatment, the bacteria can survive and develop antibiotic resistance to an increasing number of drugs. This drug-resistant bacteria can then spread to other people, making the disease much more expensive to treat.
The chart shows the cost of treating a single patient with tuberculosis in India.
For tuberculosis patients without drug resistance, the average cost of treatment is only $24.
But among patients who have multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, the cost is almost $400. With extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, it costs more than $1,000. That’s about 50 times higher than patients without drug resistance.
The share of democracies has recently stagnated but remains near its historical high
Over the last twenty years, the share of countries that are democracies has remained relatively stable.
Relying on data from Varieties of Democracy, which we just updated, the chart shows that around half of all countries are democracies.
The world remains close to the historical high in the early 2000s and is much more democratic than 50 years ago; only 20% of countries were democracies in the early 1970s.
However, the chart shows smaller changes within democratic regimes: the share of liberal democracies, which grant additional individual and minority rights and constrain their governments, has decreased over the last decade.
While democracy has remained fairly resilient over the last few decades, this recent stagnation and limited rollback stresses that progress on increasing political rights is neither linear nor guaranteed.
Commercial flights have become significantly safer in recent decades
According to figures from the Aviation Safety Network, in the 1970s, there were about 6 fatal airliner accidents for every million commercial flights. This meant about 1 in every 165,000 flights ended in a fatal accident.
As the chart shows, this figure has dropped steadily in the last 50 years. According to the latest data, it is now about half a fatality per million flights. This means that, on average, it now takes more than 2 million flights for a fatal accident to occur.
Sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping dropped sharply with the introduction of new rules in 2020
The Community Emissions Data System (CEDS) produces invaluable long-term data on the emissions of air pollutants worldwide. It has just published its latest update, extending this data to 2022.
One of the most striking changes in air pollution trends has been the abrupt drop in sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from shipping. As you can see in the chart — where shipping is highlighted in red — there was a dramatic fall from over 10 million tonnes a year in 2019 to 3 million tonnes a year later.
The change resulted from the International Maritime Organization’s strict limits on marine fuels, introduced in 2020: the maximum percentage of sulfur allowed in these fuels fell from 3.5% to 0.5%. All ships worldwide had to comply.
This drop is positive for tackling local air pollution and acid rain. However, it also has implications for climate change since SO2 has masked some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.