Cereal yields have increased in all regions, but Africa lags behind. Improved crop yields have allowed the world to feed billions more people while sparing forests and other land from agriculture. Global yields of cereal crops have tripled since 1961.

The largest cause of deforestation is, and has been, the expansion of farmland. But the production of which products, in particular, has been driving this in recent decades? A recent study, published in Nature Food by Chandrakant Singh and Martin Persson, answered this question.

Is Europe having a bad wildfire year? Our Deputy Editor @hannahritchie.bsky.social provides an answer this morning on her Substack, presenting data from Europe's Global Wildfire Information System.

Half of Nigeria’s population lives in cities— In recent decades, sub-Saharan Africa has been the world’s fastest-urbanizing region. The region’s most populous country, Nigeria, shows the scale of that change. In 1950, only around 1 in 10 Nigerians lived in a city. Today, it is nearly 1 in 2.

The latest OWID Brief newsletter is out on Substack! It delivers all our recent work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox twice a month.

Most of the world’s fastest-growing megacities will soon be in Africa— Many cities across East Asia and Latin America have grown quickly over the last few decades. Since 1950, São Paulo’s population has grown sixfold. Shanghai’s nearly tenfold.

In the past, most people worked in agriculture; in today’s rich countries, only a small share do. Since the agricultural revolution, the majority of the labor force in countries like France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands worked in farming.

We have a new Economic Inequality topic page— Public attention to economic inequality has grown a lot over the last twenty years. At the same time, the available data has greatly improved too: it now covers many more countries and longer time periods, and is more comparable and accessible than ever

How have humans reshaped the world’s land over the last 12,000 years? Over thousands of years, humans have gradually transformed the Earth’s surface — clearing land for agriculture (crops and grazing animals) and building settlements.

Three-quarters of eggs produced in the United Kingdom are free-range— Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost all the eggs in our supermarket came from battery hens, those raised in small wire enclosures.

@hannahritchie.bsky.social’s book, Clearing the Air, is coming out in paperback in September— Hannah, our Deputy Editor and Science Outreach Lead, published her second book, Clearing the Air, last year in hardback. The paperback version will soon come out in the UK — on 3rd September.

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.

Track global health with the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO)— To understand how health is changing on a global scale, we need data that covers a multitude of health indicators across all countries and over many decades.

Rich countries have ten times as many doctors per person as poor ones— A person’s access to doctors depends heavily on the income level of the country they live in. High-income countries have around ten times as many doctors per person as low-income ones.

✍️ New article from @hannahritchie.bsky.social: “How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?” Artificial intelligence is being adopted rapidly across the world, and this is accelerating the demand for data centers that run these models.

Nearly half of young children in Guatemala suffer from stunting— Chronic malnutrition in early childhood can slow development and growth, leaving children shorter than expected for their age.

The latest OWID Brief newsletter is out on Substack! It delivers all our recent work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox twice a month. This edition: Urbanization, electric cars in Latin America, a 1,200-year climate record, and more.

Fertility rates across many countries have converged, despite starting from very different levels. (This Data Insight was written by @hannahritchie.bsky.social.) In the thirty years since I was born, fertility rates in my country, the United Kingdom, have not changed much.

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!

How do we track a changing climate? Among all the charts on our site, the one here reaches further back in time than almost any other: the concentration of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 800,000 years.

Electric cars are taking off quickly in Latin America— Five years ago, almost no one in Latin America bought an electric car. Today, the situation is different: electric cars now make up a meaningful and fast-growing share of new car sales.

📃 We have a new topic page on urbanization! It brings together our writing and dozens of new charts on where and how people live. Here is a selection of charts and data highlights from the new page. 🧵 3.5 billion people live in cities

Our data scientist Tuna Acisu’s successful quest to continue a 1,200-year-old climate record— How can we learn about temperatures and climate change from before thermometers even existed?

Until the middle of the 20th century, few countries had political leaders that were women. These were monarchs, who rose to their positions because of their royal lineage.

🔧📊 We recently built four interactive tools that give you new ways to explore our rich datasets — check them out! 🧵 Population projections: lets you test how changes in fertility rates, life expectancy, and migration rates will change future populations. → ourworldindata.org/population-s...

The latest OWID Brief newsletter is out on Substack! It delivers all our recent work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox twice a month. This edition: Our new food trade data tool, heat deaths, paying for CO₂ emissions, fact-checking with Grok on X, and more.

How many people die from extreme temperatures, and how this could change in the future? Think about someone dying from extreme temperatures. You probably pictured someone passing out from heat stroke or dying from hypothermia.

Track oil spills from tankers since the 1970s— Oil spills from tankers (ships transporting oil) have fallen dramatically since the 1970s, in both number and volume (the latter shown in the chart here).

US and Chinese companies train almost all of the world’s most-used AI models. (This Data Insight was written by Edouard Mathieu.) Dozens of companies worldwide develop large AI models, but it can be difficult to get a sense of where the most-used ones tend to come from.

📊 New interactive data visualization: How does food get traded around the world? Head to the local supermarket, and many of us will find foods shipped in from all over the world. Perhaps bananas from South America, cocoa beans from West Africa, or citrus fruits from Southern Europe.