Our World in Data

3 Jan

All three statements are true at the same time—

📝 New article on Our World in Data: How much development aid is spent on climate change? For a long time, we didn’t have good data to answer this basic question.

Concerns about the displacement of traditional projects seem real, but so too are concerns that commitments to climate finance are often met through a relabeling exercise.

In our article, we dig into the data on climate-related aid projects: how it’s changed over time and which countries give and receive it. Read the article by @hannahritchie.bsky.social and @parriagadap.bsky.social: ourworldindata.org/how-much-dev...

📝 New article on Our World in Data: How much development aid is spent on climate change? For a long time, we didn’t have good data to answer this basic question.

When we look at individual examples, many look like traditional aid projects, with a subtle link to climate efforts. Take the building of a hospital in Tanzania; its main objective is to provide healthcare and save lives.

But it’s also tagged as a climate-related project because it was built with energy efficiency in mind. Would that hospital have been built in a world without climate change? Probably. Other cases are less clear.

📝 New article on Our World in Data: How much development aid is spent on climate change? For a long time, we didn’t have good data to answer this basic question.

For allocable bilateral aid — that is, aid given from one country to another for specific projects — the share was one-third. Some of that aid is given to climate mitigation projects, which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Some is given to adaptation: ways of dealing with the impacts of climate change. And just as much is given to projects that do both. Whether climate-related aid is in conflict or crowds out other aid efforts is hard to untangle.

📝 New article on Our World in Data: How much development aid is spent on climate change? For a long time, we didn’t have good data to answer this basic question.

But using tags from the RioMarkers database, we’ve constructed a dataset on how much aid is spent on climate change, and what that funding is used for. The headline result is that, in 2024, around one-fifth of development aid was climate-related.

The world is getting more of its electricity from renewables but less from nuclear power. If the world is to reduce its carbon emissions and tackle climate change, it needs to move away from fossil fuels to low-carbon power.

(written by @hannahritchie.bsky.social and @parriagadap.bsky.social) Explore the electricity mix of different countries: ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec...

Other sources & data: ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec... ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec...

In the chart, you can see the share of global electricity coming from fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear since 1985. Since 2000, nuclear and renewables have followed very different trajectories. Back then, both accounted for a similar share of global electricity.

But in 2025, renewables made up more than three times as much: 34% compared to 9%. The total amount of electricity produced by nuclear plants is about the same as it was two decades ago. But because the world produces much more electricity overall, its share of the electricity mix has declined.

There are two key sources of low-carbon electricity: renewables — which include solar, wind, hydropower and others — and nuclear power.

While rapid growth in solar and wind has increased the amount of electricity coming from renewables, a lack of enthusiasm for nuclear means it’s playing a shrinking role in the global mix.

In the early 1980s, almost half a million people were paralyzed by polio every year. The number of cases has fallen by more than 99% from its peak, and foreign aid programs have played a crucial role in the fight against polio.

If all donor countries were as generous as the most generous country — Norway, at 1.1% of GNI — the global aid budget would increase to around $700 billion.

That means we could deliver up to three times as many polio vaccines, antimalarial bed nets, HIV treatments, and food packages as we currently do. Read the article by @hannahritchie.bsky.social: ourworldindata.org/foreign-aid-...

So if we want to see an increase in global foreign aid, building public support for more generous aid budgets from our governments matters a lot. The UN has a target for developed countries to give 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) to foreign aid.

Only five countries — Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark — met this target in 2023. If all developed countries achieved this, we’d add an extra $216 billion to the pot, meaning the global aid budget would almost double.

What’s true for polio is also true for other diseases and essential resources like food. These successes have been achieved with a relatively small amount of money. In 2023, the world gave around $240 billion in foreign aid. It’s a very small percentage of most rich countries’ economies.

More than 95% of foreign aid came from national governments in 2023. Just under $11 billion — or 4.5% of the total — came from private grants from philanthropic foundations.

We are a nonprofit, building Our World in Data as a public good that's freely available to everyone. We just updated the list of people who have supported our work with a donation: ourworldindata.org/funding We are very grateful to each of you. Thank you so much!

No matter what poverty line you choose, the share of the global population below it has declined. The World Bank's International Poverty Line is an extremely low poverty line. Set at $3 per day, it draws attention to the living conditions of the poorest people on the planet.

But on the right-hand side of the chart, we see that most people still live on low incomes: 81% of people in the world live on less than $30 a day, or about $900 a month. (written by @maxroser.bsky.social)

As Max Roser wrote in a short article, the history of the end of poverty has only just begun: ourworldindata.org/history-of-p...

But is progress against global poverty only happening when measured against such a very low poverty line? The chart gives the answer. The entire blue line is below the entire dark red line. This tells us that no matter what line you choose, the share below it has declined globally.

Progress against higher poverty lines has been large, too. The share living on less than $5 a day has declined from 57% to 25%, and the share living on less than $10 a day has declined from 74% to 53%.

In the chart above, you can see how the share below this poverty line has declined over the last generation. In the year 2000, 36% of the world’s population lived on less than $3 per day. In 2024, it was 10%.

What do death certificates tell us about what people die from? When someone dies, a doctor or an official records the cause on a death certificate. Countries add up these records and send the totals to the World Health Organization (WHO), which publishes them in its Mortality Database.

On the same map for men, lung cancer comes first in 58 countries. The map only shows data for a handful of countries in Africa and South Asia. Most of the others have no data because many deaths there are never officially registered, or are registered without a doctor certifying the cause.

The WHO only shows the years in which at least 65% of a country’s deaths were registered with a cause. (This data update was led by @lcsrg.me.) Explore all of the updated data in our interactive charts: ourworldindata.org/search?datas...

We recently brought the latest data release to our site. It covers 25 types of cancer, such as stomach cancer, and broad groups of causes, such as cardiovascular diseases. It also has data on suicides and homicides, and feeds 72 of our charts.

The map shows which type of cancer has the highest death rate among women in each country. Breast cancer comes first in 59 of the 91 countries and territories with recent data, and lung cancer in 23, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

At the peak of the HIV epidemic, AIDS caused more than half of all deaths in some countries. The HIV epidemic — which started in the early 1980s and progressed rapidly in the 1990s — has had lasting impacts that continue today. More than 800,000 people still die from HIV/AIDS every year.

But about one in five deaths in these countries was still caused by AIDS in 2023. (written by @hannahritchie.bsky.social and @parriagadap.bsky.social) Read our article on antiretroviral therapy and the millions of lives it has saved: ourworldindata.org/art-lives-sa...

Other sources & data: ourworldindata.org/grapher/annu...

But some countries were hit much harder than others. In the chart, you can see the share of all deaths in a given year caused by HIV/AIDS in four countries that were particularly badly affected.

At the height of the epidemic, more than half of all deaths in Zimbabwe and Botswana, and over 40% in South Africa and Namibia, were caused by the disease. Thankfully, interventions to prevent the spread of HIV and treatments such as antiretroviral therapy have reduced death rates across the world.

A long-term perspective on humanity’s battle against malaria. According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, the global death rate from malaria has almost halved since the year 2000. The chart above puts this recent progress into a larger historical perspective.

This means that the recent progress shown in the chart is, above all, Africa’s progress. (written by @maxroser.bsky.social)

If you want to be a part of this historic change, read Max Roser's brief article on how you can contribute to humanity’s battle against malaria: ourworldindata.org/malaria-intr... Other sources & data: ourworldindata.org/malaria-past...

If it were still as high as it was then, around 16 million people would die from malaria every year instead of 610,000. Behind this long-run decline is a shift in the distribution of the burden of malaria. In the first half of the 20th century, most malaria victims died in the Asian tropics.