Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days.
Yesterday
Spain is having its largest wildfire year in well over a decade
The Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) has published weekly data on the area burned by wildfires since 2012. At the beginning of August, Spain was on track for a relatively low year. Its running total for 2025 was below the average and far below former records.
But just two weeks later, it had overtaken all of these previous years. You can see this in the chart, which shows the cumulative wildfire burn across each year. Large outbreaks in mid-August meant the last record, set in 2022, was rapidly surpassed.
This global dataset from GWIS only dates back to 2012, so it is a relatively short record. However, the European Forest Fire Information System, based on data starting in 2006, also found that this year’s fires were the highest in two decades in Spain.
Portugal has also seen extremely large fires this year.
Note that consistent data is unavailable over longer periods, so it’s hard to give context to the scale of these fires compared to the more distant past.
See how large wildfires in your country have been compared to previous years →
September 01, 2025
Solar overtakes gas to become Hungary's second-largest electricity source
A decade ago, solar power was almost non-existent in Hungary. It generated just 0.2% of the country’s electricity. Nuclear, coal, and gas dominated the grid.
But in the last ten years, things have changed a lot. You can see this in the chart: solar power has boomed, and now supplies one-quarter of Hungary’s electrical power. In 2024, it overtook gas to become the second-largest source of electricity, after nuclear.
Coal power has been largely displaced, first by gas and now by solar. This has helped cut the country’s CO2 emissions by 45% since 1990.
Explore how the electricity mix is changing in your country →
August 29, 2025
From candles to electrons: changing lighting sources in the United Kingdom
Many of us take artificial light for granted. Most of us use it daily: we can read, cook, and do tasks indoors; students can study at night; and our communities and homes are safer when not cloaked in darkness.
It’s not just light that has been transformative, but cheap light. The price of lighting has fallen by more than 99.9% since the 1700s.
Changes in what we use to power lighting have been crucial to the plummeting costs. This chart, based on data from Fouquet and Pearson, shows these changes from 1700 to 2000.
In 1700, the typical British household lit its evenings with candles. In the 18th century, they started using whale oil, and by the 19th century, they saw the rise of burning gas. Kerosene briefly provided a fifth of light around 1900. With each transition, lighting became more efficient, and the costs dropped. But the defining transition has been to electricity. It now provides almost all of the UK’s artificial light.
For hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest, lighting at night is still a luxury, and will remain so until they get access to electricity.
Explore what the cost and distribution of lighting tell us about human development →
August 27, 2025
Homicide rates in Ecuador have increased steeply in the last few years
For most of the 2010s, Ecuador had some of the lowest murder rates in Latin America. According to data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, rates were often three or four times lower than the regional average.
But as you can see in the chart, homicide rates have risen steeply in the last few years. From 2020 to 2023, rates increased more than fivefold. To put this in context: the number of people murdered each year increased from roughly 1,400 to 8,200.
Ecuador went from being one of the safest countries in the region to having one of the highest murder rates, not only in Latin America, but in the world as a whole.
This increase in violence has been linked to Ecuador’s growing role in international drug trafficking and competition between criminal groups. Large outbreaks of prison violence, often involving rival gangs, have also contributed.
Estimates of homicide rates can vary between sources; read our explainer on differences between them →
August 25, 2025
Over the last six decades, China has rapidly increased and diversified its meat consumption
Go back to China in the 1960s, and you’ll find that the average person ate very little meat. This isn’t surprising: most of the country lived in extreme poverty and could not afford it. Meat consumption is strongly correlated with income: as countries get richer, they tend to have more diverse, meat-heavy diets.
However, as the chart shows, meat supply per person has increased significantly over the last sixty years. In 1962, annual consumption was just 4 kilograms per person. By 2022, it had increased almost 18-fold to 70 kilograms.
It’s not only the amount of meat consumed that’s changed: people in China also eat a more diverse mix. In the 1960s and 1980s, almost all meat came from pork. Today, pork still dominates, but it is joined by more poultry and beef.
This change in diet matters for various reasons. More diversified diets (which are not only about animal products) tend to be more nutritious than monotonous staple-heavy diets that are common for people living in poverty. But this increase in meat consumption also comes with a large environmental impact and consequences for animal welfare.
Explore how meat consumption has changed in your own country →
August 22, 2025
Counting lives saved is difficult, but it can show us the great difference some people have made
Scientists can make an enormous difference in the world.
Take the researcher Sarah Gilbert, who has dedicated her career to developing vaccines. Over the last two decades, she has contributed to vaccines against the flu, MERS, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley fever. When she heard about the outbreak in China in January 2020, she began working on a vaccine, just in case. By the end of that year, the vaccine against COVID-19 was approved, saving an estimated 6.3 million lives in the following year alone. Without this effort, we would have faced a much darker reality, marked by lockdowns, overwhelmed health systems, and widespread suffering.
This chart lists many such scientists whose work saved many people’s lives. The estimates are taken from the web publication Science Heroes, where you can find profiles of these scientists.
It’s difficult to estimate the exact difference particular innovations have made, and I take all such estimates with a grain of salt. None of these scientists did their work in isolation; their innovations were achieved thanks to collaborative efforts and the earlier work of other researchers.
Our team spends much of its time counting deaths, but it’s equally important to know the number of lives saved — even though it is harder to estimate and involves much larger uncertainty. It’s inspiring to be reminded that creative, enterprising, and tenacious people can enormously contribute to our lives.
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented synthetic fertilizers, are at the top of this list. My colleague Hannah Ritchie wrote an article about the difference their work has made: How many people does synthetic fertilizer feed? →
August 20, 2025
Gold export data suggests that Peru, one of the world’s largest producers, mines nearly as much informally as it does formally
According to official mining output records, Peru mined about 90 tonnes of gold in 2023, far ahead of any other South American country. That puts it within the world’s top 15 producers, just below the 10th place, as shown in the chart.
However, this official figure captures only part of Peru’s gold economy. Customs export data shows a striking discrepancy: about 80 tonnes of unaccounted gold in 2023, according to the Peruvian Institute of Economics. That’s gold whose value appears in export statistics but not mine-output records — and it is almost as large as the official figure based on mine records.
Some of this gap may be due to re-exports, inventories, or recycled gold. But given how big the discrepancy is, Peru’s authorities, researchers, and media see it as a practical indicator of the scale of informal and illegal mining. An article in The Economist, for example, compares Peru with other countries using this approach, and argues that gold has become more profitable than drugs for many gangs in South America.
Illegal gold mining is widely recognized as a major issue in Peru and the region, frequently linked to environmental damage and organized crime. This context matters today: the steep recent increase in gold prices raises incentives around unregulated extraction and trade.
→ Our Minerals Data Explorer has more data on metals, minerals, and mining. This United Nations report provides more information about illegal mining and its environmental effects.