Our World in Data

Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific website dedicated to exploring significant global issues like poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, conflict, existential threats, and inequality. This initiative is run by the Global Change Data Lab, a charitable organization located in England and Wales. It was established by Max Roser, who has a background in social history and development economics. The research team operates out of the University of Oxford.

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Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?

3 days ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

It’s difficult to compare countries because they don’t always measure infant mortality in the same way. Which country is the safest for a baby to be born? Answering this question might seem easy: divide the number of infants who die by the total number of infants born; make a map of these rates and find the lowest number.
Children in rich countries are much less likely to die than a few decades ago, but we rarely hear about this progress

1 week ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

In most rich countries, child mortality has more than halved in the last thirty years; we know we can go further. As recently as 1990, one in five newborns in Ethiopia would die before the age of five. This was the norm across many poorer countries. Since most couples would have more than five children, many parents had to see one of their children die.
Most food is transported by boat, so food miles are a relatively small part of the carbon footprint of most diets

2 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

Describing someone as “young” or “old” is rather arbitrary. However, something we can quantify is whether a given person is “young” or “old” compared to the rest of the world. Imagine we sorted all 8 billion people alive today from youngest to oldest. The person standing right in the middle would be about 30 years old; that's the median age today. The chart shows the global median age and the UN’s projection to 2100. In 2025, if you are over 30, you are older than most people in the world.
How effective and safe are measles vaccines?

3 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Saloni Dattani

One dose of the MMR vaccine (the combined vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella) reduces the chance of getting measles by around 95%.3 This means the risk was twenty times lower in the vaccinated. This is shown in the top panel of the chart. After two doses of the vaccine, the risk was twenty-five times lower than in unvaccinated children.
Most of the world’s foreign aid comes from governments, not philanthropic foundations

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

Foreign aid provides millions worldwide with life-saving treatments, emergency food supplies, and humanitarian assistance. But where does most of this money come from: the governments of rich countries, or wealthy individuals? 95% of foreign aid comes from governments. Less than 5% comes from private philanthropic donors. This data focuses on larger private donations in the form of grants; it does not include the smaller, individual charity donations you or I might make.
China reduced extreme poverty rapidly, but Indonesia hasn't been far behind

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

China is often the poster child for rapid reductions in poverty, and for good reason: in the early 1980s, over 90% of its population lived in extreme poverty, but by the early 2020s, that number had dropped to nearly zero. Some people assume that China is the only reason global extreme poverty has declined. But that’s wrong: many other countries have seen dramatic reductions in poverty. Indonesia is one clear example; it’s shown alongside China on the chart.
Twice as many young Brazilians die from homicide than road injuries

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

The HIV epidemic — which started in the early 1980s and continued into the 1990s — has had lasting impacts that continue today. Almost one million people still die from HIV/AIDS every year globally. However, some countries were hit much harder than others. In the chart, you can see the share of all deaths in a given year that were caused by HIV/AIDS in four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that were badly affected.
Air pollution kills millions every year - where does it come from?

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie |Pablo Rosado

A breakdown of the sources of many air pollutants that damage our health and ecosystems. Millions of people die prematurely from air pollution every year. This problem has existed since humans started burning materials for fuel — first wood and biomass, then fossil fuels. But it’s an environmental and public health problem that we can make progress on.
The world is getting more of its electricity from renewables but less from nuclear power

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

The world needs to move away from fossil fuels to low-carbon power if we’re to reduce our carbon emissions and tackle climate change. There are two key sources of low-carbon power: renewables (which include solar, wind, hydropower and others) and nuclear. While rapid growth in solar and wind has increased the amount of power coming from renewables, a lack of enthusiasm for nuclear means it’s playing a shrinking role in the global electricity mix.
At the peak of the HIV epidemic, AIDS caused more than half of all deaths in some countries

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

The HIV epidemic — which started in the early 1980s and continued into the 1990s — has had lasting impacts that continue today. Almost one million people still die from HIV/AIDS every year globally. However, some countries were hit much harder than others. In the chart, you can see the share of all deaths in a given year that were caused by HIV/AIDS in four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that were badly affected.