Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, written by our team.
More than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for meat every year
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of land animals slaughtered for meat production has risen continuously for the past 60 years.
In 2022, the reported total reached 83 billion worldwide.
This number does not include additional deaths that occur during the production of meat and dairy, such as male baby chickens slaughtered in the egg industry, and other animals for which no data exists.
As the chart shows, the immense majority of these animals are chickens. Ducks and pigs are the second and third species most frequently slaughtered.
How many animals get slaughtered every day?
Hundreds of millions of animals get killed for meat every day.
Winters have warmed faster than summers in the United States
The world is getting hotter as a result of climate change, with some countries warming faster than others. But within countries, warming is not equal across the year.
In the United States, winters have warmed faster than any other season. This is followed by spring, with summer and fall showing the slowest rates.
The chart below shows the temperature anomaly — the change in seasonal temperature compared to the average over the 20th century (1901 to 2000). This data is collected and published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
American winters have warmed by nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (°F), compared to 1.5°F to 2°F in other seasons.
Minimum temperatures have increased faster than maximum temperatures. That means nighttime temperatures have increased more than daytime temperatures.
Airline hijackings, once relatively common, are rare today
Airline hijackings are often considered a very visible and prominent form of modern terrorism, with the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001 being a well-known tragic example.
Historical data from the Aviation Safety Network shows that airline hijackings have a long history but have become much less frequent than in the past.
Between 1968 and 1972, hijackings reached a peak, with over 305 incidents recorded globally within those five years.
In 2021, the most recent year with available data, there were 3 incidents, none involving fatalities.
On average, people have lived much longer than the period life expectancy at their time of birth
The data on this chart comes from the Human Mortality Database.
It shows that in 1930, people in France had a period life expectancy of 57 years. Period life expectancy is a metric that summarizes age-specific mortality rates in one particular year. This means that newborns would live 57 years on average if they experienced the same death rates at each age of their lives as those seen at each age in the population that year.
However, these newborns actually faced lower death rates than previous generations and lived an average of 69 years. This second measure — the average lifespan of a birth cohort — is called cohort life expectancy. It can only be calculated once all cohort members have died.
Period life expectancy is the more commonly reported “life expectancy” measure. However, these two measures are very different, and the gap can be large, as this data shows.
Read more on the difference between period and cohort measures →
One in five democracies is eroding
Based on the Episodes of Regime Transformation data, this chart shows that around 20% of democracies were slowly deteriorating in 2023.
According to the underlying expert assessments by country experts, elections are becoming less meaningful, free, or fair in these countries.
This rate of democratic erosion is unprecedented.
This is partly because the data seeks to capture gradual declines in democratic institutions, while historically, democracies often broke down rapidly in coups d’état or foreign invasions.
So, while political rights are under threat in a substantial share of democracies, there is still time to act to halt this decline, restore democratic rights, and even deepen democratic institutions.
If you want to learn more, you can read my article on recent changes in democracy, for which we just updated the data.