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https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2021/07/30/us-government-advances-anti-hunger-climate-initiatives-food-systems

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https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#:~:text=The%20absolute%20number%20of%20war,to%20be%20less%20than%20100%2C000.

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We are currently working on a historical dataset on conflict deaths and casualties. If you want to contribute to this research please get in touch.
This entry presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. We also published a visual history of human violence which shows that we may now live in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.

All our interactive charts on War and Peace

The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000.

The decline of the absolute number of battle deaths can be seen in the visualization here that shows global battle deaths per year by world region. There are three marked peaks in war deaths since then: the Korean War (early 1950s), the Vietnam War (around 1970), and the Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan wars (1980s). There has been a recent increase in battle deaths driven by conflict in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The chart above refers only to battle deaths occurring in conflicts that involved at least one state on one of the opposing sides. For more recent years, we show these 'state-based' conflict deaths alongside battle deaths in 'non-state' conflicts (where two or more organisations are fighting but no state is involved), and also violent deaths in 'one-sided violence' (where there is only one organised aggressor, such as in genocidal violence).

We see that, in recent years, state-based conflicts form the majority of such deaths, though the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 stands out for its very high death-toll.

The previous two graphs showed absolute numbers, but as the world has seen rapid population growth (see our entry on global population growth), it is more appropriate to look at relative numbers. Here we show the battle death in state-based conflicts per 100,000 people per year. The figures are shown by type of conflict.

The stacked area chart here shows the number of ongoing conflicts each year has risen. This increase however only relates to civil conflicts within states. Conflicts related to the expansion or defence of colonial empires ended with decolonisation. Conflicts between states have almost ceased to exist.

But the number of war victims varies hugely between different wars: whereas 1,200,000 died during the the Korean War (1950-1953), other wars had 'just' 1,000 victims. For this reason, statistics on the number of wars need to be interpreted alongside data on the size of these conflicts.

The increase in the number of wars is predominantly an increase of smaller conflicts. This follows from the previously shown declining number of war victims while the number of conflicts increased. The decreasing deadliness of conflicts can be seen in the bar chart.

Deadliness of wars - average battle deaths per conflict by decade, 1950-2016

The past was not peaceful

It would be wrong to believe that the past was peaceful. One reason why some people might have this impression is that many of the past conflicts feature less prominently in our memories; they are simply forgotten.

Data Quality & Definition

To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.

Here we show the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources.

The 'UCDP all' series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by Uppsala Conflict Data Program: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. (We show the data for these categories separately here).

We've summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document, World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources.

You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s.¹

But there are also large differences. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 - marking the Rwandan genocide - which is present in some series, but absent from others.

If you look closely, you'll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest.

Discrepancies between different sources of conflict deaths data are partly to do with the differences in how the underlying source information - for instance newswires, death registers, government or NGO reports, or indeed other conflict databases - are selected and interpreted.

But they also reflect conceptual differences in terms of which deaths are and aren't included in the source's definition.

Below we relate some of the differences visible in the chart above in terms of some key conceptual differences lying along three dimensions: Who, How and What.

Who: civillian vs military deaths How: direct vs indirect deaths
The Correlates of War series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture - at least to some extent - civilian deaths too. As we would expect then, the Correlates of War figures are generally lower than the others.

In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence - for instance those from gunshot or explosions - a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are indirect: due to disease, starvation or exposure. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.²

The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. The Correlates of War series includes military personnel that died from diseases 'contracted in the war theatre'. The Conflict Catalog series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts.³

While indirect deaths represent a substantial proportion of the social costs of conflict, there is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, many factors contribute to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.

Brecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the Conflict Catalog do come out the highest.

What: state involvement and one-sided violence

Across the various sources there three broad kinds of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states ("inter-state" conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor ("extra-state" conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars.

Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement.

'One-sided violence' on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or ' politicide '.

The UCDP state-based and Correlates of War series do not include such events. It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide.

Here we picture the definitions used in the various sources across these three dimensions.

There are also efforts to collect data specifically on the number of people dying from acts of terrorism - this is discussed in our entry on Terrorism.

How does the concept of terrorism relate to the concepts of conflict used in the data shown above? To what extent are terrorism deaths included in this data?

In general, definitions of terrorism include only violent episodes that are carried out by non-state actors, and definitions often emphasise events where civilians or to military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty are the target.⁴

As such, definitions of conflict deaths that include both civilian deaths and deaths caused by non-state actors will include a large fraction of the deaths normally attributed to terrorism. That is true for instance of the 'UCDP all' series in the charts shown above. This dataset, for example, includes direct deaths occurring in the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in the Taliban insurgency following the 2001 war in Afghanistan.

There are however some situations where deaths that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism might not get included even in the UCDP's broad definition of conflict. In particular, as mentioned above, the UCDP classification system has a requirement that non-state actors must have a certain degree of institutional organisation for an event to be included in its dataset. Deaths caused by attackers falling below this threshold of organisation - such as in 'lone wolf' attacks perpetrated by ideologically-motivated individuals - would not be included in the UCDP data but might fit under common definitions of terrorism.

Because deaths due to conflict and terrorism can be attributed and grouped into 'events' or 'episodes' in different ways in different datasets, it is difficult to make direct comparisons and know exactly the extent to which deaths included in one dataset are included or excluded in another. But because the larger events that would fall under typical definitions of terrorism - for instance those that are conducted by well-organised groups or are part of long-running insurgencies - will also be included in broad definitions of conflict like those used by UCDP, the latter are likely to include the majority of deaths commonly attributed to terrorism.

Data: Armed conflicts, non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, and battle-related deaths

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: since 1946 (armed conflicts, battle deaths), since 1989 (non-state conflicts, one-sided violence, battle-related deaths)

Available at: Online here and here

Data: Inter-state, intra-state, non-state, and extra-state wars

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1816-2007

Available at: Online here

Data: Conflicts

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1400-2000

Available at: Online here

Data: Deaths from conflict and terrorism

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: since 1990

Available at: Online here

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We are currently working on a historical dataset on conflict deaths and casualties. If you want to contribute to this research please get in touch. This entry presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace.

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"In the early 1800s many activists who believed in abolishing slavery decided to support women's suffrage as well. In the 1800s and early 1900s many activists who favored temperance decided to support women's suffrage, too"

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https://www.hiv.gov/blog/new-hiv-infections-drop-18-percent-in-six-years#:~:text=CDC%20researchers%20believe%20the%20declines,a%20top%20public%20health%20priority.

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Decline signals HIV prevention and treatment efforts in the U.S. are paying off, but not all communities are seeing the same progress.

The number of annual HIV infections in the United States fell 18 percent between 2008 and 2014 - from an estimated 45,700 to 37,600 - according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Seattle. Progress, however, was not the same among all populations or areas of the country.

"The nation's new high-impact approach to HIV prevention is working. We have the tools, and we are using them to bring us closer to a future free of HIV," said Jonathan Mermin, M.D., director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. "These data reflect the success of collective prevention and treatment efforts at national, state and local levels. We must ensure the interventions that work reach those who need them most."

The most recent analysis of the number of new HIV infections estimated to occur each year in the U.S. provides a sign of progress in HIV prevention. In addition to the national decline, a new CDC analysis also examined trends by transmission route from 2008 to 2014 and found annual HIV infections dropped:

56 percent among people who inject drugs (from 3,900 to 1,700);

36 percent among heterosexuals (from 13,400 to 8,600);

18 percent among young gay and bisexual males ages 13 to 24 (from 9,400 to 7,700);

18 percent among white gay and bisexual males (from 9,000 to 7,400);

And substantially in some states and Washington, D.C. - Washington, D.C. (dropping 10 percent each year over the six-year period); Maryland (down about 8 percent annually); Pennsylvania (down about 7 percent annually); Georgia (down about 6 percent annually); New York and North Carolina (both down about 5 percent annually); Illinois (down about 4 percent annually); and Texas (down about 2 percent annually).

Furthermore, CDC researchers did not find any increases in annual HIV infections in the 35 states and Washington, D.C., where annual HIV infections could be estimated - they decreased or remained stable in all of those areas.

CDC researchers believe the declines in annual HIV infections are due, in large part, to efforts to increase the number of people living with HIV who know their HIV status and are virally suppressed - meaning their HIV infection is under control through effective treatment. This is a top public health priority. Studies have shown that, in addition to improving the health of people living with HIV, early treatment with antiretroviral medications dramatically reduces a person's risk of transmitting the virus to others.

Increases in the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, may also have played a role in preventing new infections in recent years. CDC issued interim clinical guidelines in 2012 for PrEP, a pill that people who do not have HIV can take daily to reduce their risk of infection from sex by more than 90 percent. The FDA approved PrEP for HIV prevention in 2012.

"Maximizing the power of these new prevention tools in conjunction with testing and education efforts, offers the hope of ending the HIV epidemic in this nation," said Eugene McCray, M.D., director of CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. "Science has shown us the power of HIV treatment medicines in benefitting people with and without HIV."

Progress must accelerate for people at greatest risk

Gay and bisexual men were the only group that did not experience an overall decline in annual HIV infections from 2008 to 2014. This is because reduced infections among whites and the youngest gay and bisexual men were offset by increases in other groups. Annual infections remained stable at about 26,000 per year among gay and bisexual men overall and about 10,000 infections per year among black gay and bisexual men - a hopeful sign after more than a decade of increases in these populations. However, concerning trends emerged among gay and bisexual males of certain ages and ethnicities, with annual infections increasing:

35 percent among 25- to 34-year-old gay and bisexual males (from 7,200 to 9,700);

20 percent among Latino gay and bisexual males (from 6,100 to 7,300);

These data also show regional disparities in southern states, which are home to 37 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for 50 percent of estimated infections in 2014. Future analyses will examine racial and ethnic disparities of annual HIV infections.

"Unfortunately, progress remains uneven across communities and populations," said Dr. McCray. "High-impact prevention strategies must continue to be developed and implemented at the state and local levels to accelerate progress. That means more testing to diagnose infections, increasing the proportion of people with HIV who are taking HIV treatment effectively and maximizing the impact of all available prevention tools."

While HIV infections fell from 2008 to 2014 among people who inject drugs, this progress may be threatened by the nation's opioid epidemic.

"The opioid epidemic in our country is jeopardizing the dramatic progress we've made in reducing HIV among people who inject drugs," said Dr. Mermin. "We need to expand the reach of comprehensive syringe services programs, which reduce the risk of HIV infection without increasing drug use, and can link people to vital services to help them stop using drugs."

CDC focuses on high-impact, cost-effective solutions

CDC is working to accelerate prevention progress by implementing its High-Impact Prevention (HIP) approach. HIP involves delivering scientifically proven, cost-effective, and scalable interventions, with particular attention to the most heavily affected populations and geographic areas.

As part of HIP, CDC is taking action with national, state and local partners to help ensure:

HIV testing is simple, available and routine;

People living with HIV get care and treatment, starting the day they are diagnosed;

And that people who are not infected with HIV have prevention information and tools, such as comprehensive syringe services programs and PrEP, as indicated.

The bulk of CDC's HIV prevention funding is provided to state and local health departments who tailor their programming to address the most urgent local needs.

Resources

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New HIV Infections Drop 18 Percent in Six Years

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Decline signals HIV prevention and treatment efforts in the U.S.

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"After the Union victory, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on December 6 1865, prohibiting "slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime."

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"Most casualties and deaths in the Civil War were the result of non-combat-related disease. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease." there's no big reason to fight

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https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#:~:text=Hurricanes%2C%20Tornados%2C%20and%20Cyclones,-Long%2Dterm%20trends&text=Over%20this%20period%2C%20we%20see,response%20systems%20to%20disaster%20events.

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All our interactive charts on Natural Disasters

The number of deaths from natural disasters can be highly variable from year-to-year; some years pass with very few deaths before a large disaster event claims many lives.

If we look at the average over the past decade, approximately 45,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year. This represents around 0.1% of global deaths.

In the visualizations shown here we see the annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades.

What we see is that in many years, the number of deaths can be very low - often less than 10,000, and accounting for as low as 0.01% of total deaths. But we also see the devastating impact of shock events: the 1983-85 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti. All of these events pushed global disasters deaths over 200,000 - more than 0.4% of deaths in these years.

Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. We know from historical data that the world has seen a significant reduction in disaster deaths through earlier prediction, more resilient infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response systems.

Those at low incomes are often the most vulnerable to disaster events: improving living standards, infrastructure and response systems in these regions will be key to preventing deaths from natural disasters in the coming decades.

Globally, over the past decade, natural disasters accounted for an average of 0.1% of total deaths. This was, however, highly variable to high-impact events and ranged from 0.01% to 0.4% of total deaths.

In the map shown here you can explore these trends by country over the past few decades. Using the timeline on the chart you can observe changes across the world over time, or by clicking on a country you can see its individual trend.

What we observe is that for most countries the share of deaths from natural disasters are very low in most years. Often it can be zero - with no loss of life to disasters - or well below 0.01%. But we also see clearly the effects of low-frequency but high-impact events: in 2010, more than 70% of deaths in Haiti were the result of the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Number of deaths from natural disasters

Annual deaths from natural disasters

In the visualization shown here we see the long-term global trend in natural disaster deaths. This shows the estimated annual number of deaths from disasters from 1900 onwards from the EMDAT International Disaster Database.¹

What we see is that in the early-to-mid 20th century, the annual death toll from disasters was high, often reaching over one million per year. In recent decades we have seen a substantial decline in deaths. In most years fewer than 20,000 die (and in the most recent decade, this has often been less than 10,000). Even in peak years with high-impact events, the death toll has not exceeded 500,000 since the mid-1960s.

This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population - showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) - we see an even greater decline over the past century. This chart can be viewed here.

The annual number of deaths from natural disasters is also available by country since 1990. This can be explored in the interactive map.

Average number of deaths by decade

In the chart we show global deaths from natural disasters since 1900, but rather than reporting annual deaths, we show the annual average by decade. The data for this chart can be found in the table presented here.

As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 - at least five times lower than these peaks.

This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population - showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) - then we see a more than 10-fold decline over the past century. This chart can be viewed here.

Number of deaths by type of natural disaster

With almost minute-by-minute updates on what's happening in the world, we are constantly reminded of the latest disaster. These stories are, of course, important but they do not give us a sense of how the toll of disasters has changed over time.

For most of us, it is hard to know whether any given year was a particularly deadly one in the context of previous years.

To understand the devastating toll of disasters today, and in the past, we have built a Natural Disasters Data Explorer which provides estimates of fatalities, displacement and economic damage for every country since 1900. This is based on data sourced from EM-DAT; a project that undertakes the important work of building these incredibly detailed histories of disasters.²

In this visualization I give a sense of how the global picture has evolved over the last century. It shows the estimated annual death toll - from all disasters at the top, followed by a breakdown by type. The size of the bubble represents the total death toll for that year.

I've labeled most of the years with the largest death tolls. This usually provokes the follow-up question: "Why? What event happened?". So I've also noted large-scale events that contributed to the majority - but not necessarily all - of the deaths in that year.

For example, the estimated global death toll from storms in 2008 was approximately 141,000. 138,366 of these deaths occurred in Cyclone Margis, which struck Myanmar, and is labeled on the chart.

What we see is that in the 20th century, it was common to have years where the death toll was in the millions. This was usually the result of major droughts or floods. Often these would lead to famines. My colleague Joe Hasell looks at the long history of famines here.

Improved food security, resilience to other disasters, and better national and international responses mean that the world has not experienced death tolls of this scale in many decades. Famines today are usually driven by civil war and political unrest.

In most years, the death toll from disasters is now in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 people. In the most fatal years - which tend to be those with major earthquakes or cyclones - this can reach tens to hundreds of thousands.

This trend does not mean that disasters have become less frequent, for less intense. It means the world today is much better at preventing deaths from disasters than in the past. This will become increasingly important in our response and adaptation to climate change.

Human impacts from natural disasters are not fully captured in mortality rates. Injury, homelessness, and displacement can all have a significant impact on populations.

The visualisation below shows the number of people displaced internally (i.e. within a given country) from natural disasters. Note that these figures report on the basis of new cases of displaced persons: if someone is forced to flee their home from natural disasters more than once in any given year, they will be recorded only once within these statistics.

Interactive charts on the following global impacts are available using the links below:

Injuries: number of people injured is defined as "People suffering from physical injuries, trauma or an illness requiring immediate medical assistance as a direct result of a disaster."

Homelessness: number of people homeless is defined as "Number of people whose house is destroyed or heavily damaged and therefore need shelter after an event."

Affected: number of people affected is defined as "People requiring immediate assistance during a period of emergency, i.e. requiring basic survival needs such as food, water, shelter, sanitation and immediate medical assistance."

Total number affected: total number of people affected is defined as "the sum of the injured, affected and left homeless after a disaster."

Natural disasters by type

Earthquakes

Earthquake events occur across the world every day. The US Geological Survey (USGS) tracks and reports global earthquakes, with (close to) real-time updates which you can find here.

However, the earthquakes which occur most frequently are often too small to cause significant damage (whether to human life, or in economic terms).

In the chart below we show the long history of known earthquakes classified by the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) of the NOAA as 'significant' earthquakes. Significant earthquakes are those which are large enough to cause notable damage. They must meet at least one of the following criteria: caused deaths, moderate damage ($1 million or more), magnitude 7.5 or greater, Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) X or greater, or generated a tsunami.

Available data - which you can explore in the chart below - extends back to 2150 BC. But we should be aware that most recent records will be much more complete than our long-run historic estimates. An increase in the number of recorded earthquakes doesn't necessarily mean this was the true trend over time. By clicking on a country in the map below, you can view it's full series of known significant earthquakes.

Alongside estimates of the number of earthquake events, the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) of the NOAA also publish estimates of the number of deaths over this long-term series. In the chart below we see the estimated mortality numbers from 2000 BC through to 2017.

These figures can be found for specific countries using the "change country" function in the bottom-left of the chart, or by selecting the "map" on the bottom-right.

At the global level we see that earthquake deaths have been a persistent human risk through time.

The number of people dying in natural disasters is lower today than it was in the past, the world has become more resilient.

Earthquakes, however, can still claim a large number of lives. Whilst historically floods, droughts and epidemics dominated disaster deaths, a high annual death toll now often results from a major earthquake and possibly a tsunami caused by them. Since 2000, the two peak years in annual death tolls (reaching 100s of thousands) were 2004 and 2010. Earthquake deaths accounted for 93 percent and 69 percent of such deaths, respectively. In fact, both events (the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami of 2004, and Port-au-Prince earthquake in 2010) are in the deadliest earthquake rankings below.

What have been the most deadly earthquakes in human history? In the visualization we have mapped the top 10 rankings of known earthquakes which resulted in the largest number of deaths.³ This ranking is based on mortality estimates from the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC).⁴

Clicking on the visualization will open it in higher-resolution. This ranking is also summarized in table form.

The most deadly earthquake in history was in Shaanxi, China in 1556. It's estimated to have killed 830,000 people. This is more than twice that of the second most fatal: the recent Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti in 2010. It's reported that 316,000 people died as a result.⁵

Two very recent earthquakes - the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami of 2004, and 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake - feature amongst the most deadly in human history. But equally, some of the most fatal occurred in the very distant past. Making the top three was the earthquake in Antakya (Turkey) in the year 115. Both old and very recent feature near the top the list. The deadly nature earthquakes has been a persistent threat throughout our history.

Ranking

Location

Year

Estimated death toll

Earthquake magnitude

Additional information

2

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

2010

316,000

7

Death toll is still disputed. Here we present the adopted figure by the NGDC of the NOAA (for consistency with other earthquakes); this is the figure reported by the Haitian government. Some sources suggest a lower figure of 220,000. In the latter case, this event would fall to 7th place in the above rankings.

3

Antakya, Turkey

115

260,000

7.5

Antioch (ancient ruins which lie near the modern city Antakya) and surrounding areas suffered severe damage. Apamea was also destroyed and Beirut suffered severe damage. A local tsunami was triggered causing damage to the coast of Lebanon.

5

Tangshan, China

1976

242,769

7.5

Reported that the earthquake risk had been greatly underestimated meaning almost all buildings and structures were designed and built without seismic considerations. Estimated that up to 85% of buildings collapsed. Tangshan therefore large comprised of unreinforced brick buildings which resulted in a large death toll.

9

Dvin, Armenia

893

150,000

Unknown

City of Dvin was destroyed, with the collapse of most buildings, defensive walls and palaces; estimated that only 100 buildings were left standing. With its city defences ruined, Dvin was taken over and turned into a military base by Muhammad ibn Abi'l-Saj, the Sajid emir of Adharbayjan.

Volcanoes

There are a large number of volcanoes across the world which are volcanically active, but display little or only very low-level activity.

In the map we see the number of significant volcanic eruptions which occur in each country in a given year. A significant eruption is classified as one that meets at least one of the following criteria: caused fatalities, caused moderate damage (approximately $1 million or more), with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 6 or larger, caused a tsunami, or was associated with a major earthquake.⁶

Estimates of volcanic eruptions are available dating back as early as 1750 BCE, however, the data completeness for long historic events will be much lower than in the recent past.

In the visualization we see the number of deaths from significant volcanic eruptions across the world. Using the timeline on the map we can see the frequency of volcanic activity deaths over time.

If we look at deaths over the past century we see several high-impact events: the Nevado del Ruiz eruption in Colombia in 1985; the Mount Pelée eruption in Martinique in 1902; and 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia.

Landslides

Global landslide mortality risk distribution - SEDAC (NASA)⁷

Famines & Droughts

We cover the history of Famines in detail in our dedicated entry here. For this research we assembled a new global dataset on famines from the 1860s until 2016.

In the visualization shown here we see trends in drought severity in the United States. Given is the annual data of drought severity, plus the 9-year average.

This is measured by the The Palmer Drought Severity Index: the average moisture conditions observed between 1931 and 1990 at a given location is given an index value of zero. A positive value means conditions are wetter than average, while a negative value is drier than average. A value between -2 and -3 indicates moderate drought, -3 to -4 is severe drought, and -4 or below indicates extreme drought.

Hurricanes, Tornados, and Cyclones

Extreme precipitation and flooding

In the visualization shown we see the global precipitation anomaly each year; trends in the US-specific anomaly can be found here.

This precipitation anomaly is measured relative to the century average from 1901 to 2000. Positive values indicate a wetter year than normal; negative values indicate a drier year.

Also shown is US-specific data on the share of land area which experiences unusually high precipitation in any given year.

We can look at precipitation anomalies over the course of year, however, flooding events are often caused by intense rainfall over much shorter periods. Flooding events tend to occur when there is extremely high rainfall over the course of hours or days.

The visualization here shows the extent of extreme one-day precipitation in the US. What we see is a general upwards trend in the extent of extreme rainfall in recent decades.

Extreme Temperature (Heat & Cold)

Extreme temperature risks to human health and mortality can result from both exposure to extreme heat and cold.

In the visualizations shown here we see long-term data on heatwaves and unusually high temperatures in the United States.

Overall we see there is significant year-to-year variability in the extent of heatwave events. What stands out over the past century of data was the 1936 North American heatwave - one of the most extreme heat wave events in modern history, which coincided with the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

When we look at the trajectory of unusually high summer temperatures over time (defined as 'unusually high' in the context of historical records) we see an upward trend in recent decades.

Wildfires

How are the frequency and extent of wildfires in the United States changing over time?

In the charts below we provide three overviews: the number of wildfires, the total acres burned, and the average acres burned per wildfire. This data is shown from 1983 onwards, when comparable data recording began.

Over the past 30-35 years we notice three general trends in the charts below (although there is significant year-to-year variability):

on average, the annual number of wildfires has not changed much;

on average, the total acres burned has increased from the 1980s and 1990s into the 21st century;

the combination of these two factors suggest that the average acres burned per wildfire has increased.

There has been significant media coverage of the long-run statistics of US wildfires reported by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). The original statistics are available back to the year 1926. When we look at this long-term series (our chart is here) it suggests there has been a significant decline in acres burned over the past century. However, the NIFC explicitly state:

Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.

Representatives from the NIFC have again confirmed (see the Carbon Brief's coverage here) that these historic statistics are not comparable to those since 1983. The lack of reliable methods of measurement and reporting mean some historic statistics may in fact be double or triple-counted in national statistics.

This means we cannot compare the recent data below with old, historic records. But it also doesn't confirm that acres burned today are higher than the first half of the 20th century. Historically, fires were an often-used method of clearing land for agriculture, for example. It's not implausible to expect that wildfires of the past may have been larger than today but the available data is not reliable enough to confirm this.

Lightning

World map of frequency of lightning strikes - Wikipedia (NASA data)⁸

Global disaster costs

Natural disasters not only have devastating impacts in terms of the loss of human life, but can also cause severe destruction with economic costs.

When we look at global economic costs over time in absolute terms we tend to see rising costs. But, importantly, the world - and most countries - have also gotten richer. Global gross domestic product has increased more than four-fold since 1970. We might therefore expect that for any given disaster, the absolute economic costs could be higher than in the past.

A more appropriate metric to compare economic costs over time is to look at them in relation to GDP. This is the indicator adopted by all countries as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to monitor progress on resilience to disaster costs.

In the chart shown here we see global direct disaster losses given as a share of GDP. There is notable year-to-year variability in costs - ranging from 0.15% to 0.5% of global GDP. In recent decades there has been no clear trending increase in damages when we take account of economic growth over this period.

This is also true when we look at damages specifically for weather-related disasters. This trend in damages relative to global GDP is also shown in the interactive chart.

Disaster costs by country

Since economic losses from disasters in relation to GDP is the indicator adopted by all countries within the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this data is also now reported for each country.

The map shows direct disaster costs for each country as a share of its GDP. Here we see large variations by country - a 100-fold difference ranging from less than 0.05% to 5%. This data can be found in absolute terms here.

How many deaths does it take for a natural disaster to be newsworthy?

This is a question researchers Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg asked in a 2007 study.⁹

The two authors found that for every person killed by a volcano, nearly 40,000 people have to die of a food shortage to get the same probability of coverage in US televised news.¹⁰

In other words, the type of disaster matters to how newsworthy networks find it to be. The visualizations show the extent of this observed "news effect". The chart shows the proportion of each type of disaster that receives news coverage, and the second shows the "casualties ratio", which tells us-all else equal-how many casualties would make media coverage equally likely for each type of disaster.

The study, which primarily set out to examine mass media's influence on US natural disaster response, considered over 5,000 natural disasters¹¹ and 700,000 news stories from the major US national broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) between 1968 and 2002.

The findings tells us, among other important things, that networks tend to be selective in their coverage and attention is not reflecting the severity and number of people killed or affected by a natural disaster.

Instead of considering the objective damage caused by natural disasters, networks tend to look for disasters that are "rife with drama", as one New York Times article put it¹²-hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, earthquakes all make for splashy headlines and captivating visuals.

Thanks to this selectivity, less "spectacular" but often times more deadly natural disasters tend to get passed over. Food shortages, for example, result in the most casualties and affect the most people per incident¹³ but their onset is more gradual than that of a volcanic explosion or sudden earthquake. As a result, food shortages are covered only 3% of the time while a comparatively indulgent 30% of earthquakes and volcanic events get their time in the spotlight.

Additionally, when the researchers "hold all else equal" by controlling for factors such as yearly trends in news intensity and the number of people killed and affected, the difference in coverage is even more pronounced.

This bias for the spectacular is not only unfair and misleading, but also has the potential to misallocate attention and aid. Disasters that happen in an instant leave little time for preventative intervention. On the other hand, the gradual disasters that tend to affect more lives build up slowly, allowing more time for preventative measures to be taken. However, in a Catch-22 situation, the gradual nature of these calamities is also what prevents them from garnering the media attention they deserve.

There are other biases, too. Eisensee and Strömberg found that while television networks cover more than 15% of the disasters in Europe and South Central America, they show less than 5% of the disasters in Africa and the Pacific. Disasters in Africa tend to get less coverage than ones in Asia because they are less "spectacular", with more droughts and food shortages occurring there relative to Asia.

However, after controlling for disaster type, along with other factors such as the number killed and the timing of the news, there is no significant difference between coverage of African and Asian disasters. Instead, a huge difference emerges between coverage of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific on the one hand, and Europe and South and Central America, on the other.

According to the researchers' estimates, 45 times as many people would have to die in an African disaster for it to garner the same media attention as a European one. The two visualizations show the extent of this bias.

ABC News's slogan is "See the whole picture" and CNN's is "Go there", but good follow-up questions might be: what exactly, and where?

One of the major successes over the past century has been the dramatic decline in global deaths from natural disasters - this is despite the fact that the human population has increased rapidly over this period.

Behind this improvement has been the improvement in living standards; access to and development of resilient infrastructure; and effective response systems. These factors have been driven by an increase in incomes across the world.

What remains true today is that populations in low-income countries - those where a large percentage of the population still live in extreme poverty, or score low on the Human Development Index - are more vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters.

We see this effect in the visualization shown. This chart shows the death rates from natural disasters - the number of deaths per 100,000 population - of countries grouped by their socio-demographic index (SDI). SDI is a metric of development, where low-SDI denotes countries with low standards of living.

What we see is that the large spikes in death rates occur almost exclusively for countries with a low or low-middle SDI. Highly developed countries are much more resilient to disaster events and therefore have a consistently low death rate from natural disasters.

Note that this does not mean low-income countries have high death tolls from disasters year-to-year: the data here shows that in most years they also have very low death rates. But when low-frequency, high-impact events do occur they are particularly vulnerable to its effects.

Overall development, poverty alleviation, and knowledge-sharing of how to increase resilience to natural disasters will therefore be key to reducing the toll of disasters in the decades to come.

There are multiple terms used to describe extreme weather events: hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tornadoes. What is the difference between these terms, and how are they defined?

The terms hurricane, cyclone and typhoon all refer to the same thing; they can be used interchangeably. Hurricanes and typhoons are both described as the weather phenomenon 'tropical cyclone'. A tropical cyclone is a weather event which originates over tropical or subtropical waters and results in a rotating, organized system of clouds and thunderstorms. Its circulation patterns should be closed and low-level.

The choice of terminology is location-specific and depends on where the storm originates. The term hurricane is used to describe a tropical cyclone which originates in the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific. When it originates in the Northwest Pacific, we call it typhoon. In the South Pacific and Indian Ocean the general term tropical cyclone is used.

In other words, the only difference between a hurricane and typhoon is where it occurs.

The characteristics of a hurricane are described in detail at the NASA website.

A hurricane evolves from a tropical disturbance or storm based on a threshold of wind speed.

A tropical disturbance arises over warm ocean waters. It can grow into a tropical depression which is an area of rotating thunderstorms with winds up to 62 kilometres (38 miles) per hour. From there, a depression evolves into a tropical storm if its wind speed reaches 63 km/hr (39 mph).

Finally a hurricane is formed when a tropical storm reaches a wind speed of 119 km/hr (74 mph).

But, hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones are distinctly different from tornadoes.

Whilst hurricanes and tornadoes have a characteristic circulatory wind patterns, they are very different weather systems. The main difference between the systems is scale (tornadoes are small-scale circulatory systems; hurricanes are large-scale). These differences are highlighted in the table below:

Hurricanes/typhoons

Tornadoes

Diameter
60 to 1000s miles

Up to 1 - 1.5 miles (usually less)

Wind speed
74 to 200 mph

40 to 300 mph

Lifetime
Long (usually days)

Very short (usually minutes)

Travel distance
Long (100 metres to 100 miles)

Short distances

Environmental impact
Can have impact on wider environment and atmospheric patterns.

Local (although can be very high impact). Little wider impact on atmospheric systems or environment.

The intensity or size of volcanic eruptions are most commonly defined by a metric termed the 'volcanic explosivity index (VEI)'. The VEI is derived based on the erupted mass or deposit of an eruption. The scale for VEI was outlined by Newhall & Self (1982), but is now commonly adopted in geophysical reporting.¹⁴

The table below provides a summary (from the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center) of the characteristics of eruptions of different VEI values. A 'Significant Volcanic Eruption' is often defined as an eruption with a VEI value of 6 or greater. Historic eruptions that were definitely explosive, but carry no other descriptive information are assigned a default VEI of 2.

Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI)

General description

Cloud Column Height (km)

Volume (m³)

Qualititative Description

Classification

How frequent?

Example

A key issue of data quality is the consistency of even reporting over time. For long-term trends in natural disaster events we know that reporting and recording of events today is much more advanced and complete than in the past. This can lead to significant underreporting or uncertainty of events in the distant past.

In the chart here we show data on the number of reported natural disasters over time.

This change over time can be influenced by a number of factors, namely the increased coverage of reporting over time. The increase over time is therefore not directly reflective of the actual trend in disaster events.

This same data is shown here as the number of reported disaster events by type. Again, the incompleteness of historical data can lead to significant underreporting in the past. The increase over time is therefore not directly reflective of the actual trend in disaster events.

Wikipedia has several lists of disasters, and an overview of these lists can be found at List of Disasters.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), Global Burden of Disease

EM-DAT - The International Disaster Database

Data: EM-DAT is a catalogue of disasters listing detailed information on natural disasters: droughts (famines), earthquakes, epidemics, extreme temperatures, floods, insect infestations, mass movement (dry & wet), storms, volcanos, and wildfires. There is also a data section on technological disasters.

Geographical coverage: Global - country and regional level (primarily cross-country data set, but also contains the name of the sub-national regions affected by disasters)

Time span: 1900 onwards

Available at: EM-DAT

Raw data has to be requested but the section on disaster trends encompasses a number of visualizations (time series and maps).

EM-DAT is maintained by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED)

EM-DAT data on the annual number of deaths and number of affected by drought, epidemics, earthquakes, extreme temperature, flood, storm, tsunami, plane crash by country is available at Gapminder. Here is the data on the number of people killed in earthquakes during a year.

Earth Observatory by NASA - Natural Hazards

Natural Hazards Data - U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC)

Data: Data and maps on many natural hazards including cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and wildfires. It includes the 'Global Significant Earthquake Database, 2150 B.C. to present' (5500 events) and 'The Significant Volcanic Eruption Database' and 'Global Historical Tsunami Events and Runups' among many other datasets.

Geographical coverage: Global - exact location

Time span: Millennia

Available at: Online here

Download maps as pdf or ArcIMS interactive maps, and data in tab-delimited data files or html.

Global Risk Data Platform

Data: Spatial data on tropical cyclones and related storm surges, drought, earthquakes, biomass fires, floods, landslides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: Recent past

Available at: The website can be found here.

Users can visualize, download or extract data on past hazardous events, human & economical hazard exposure and risk from natural hazards.

Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) - by NASA

Center for Hazards & Risk Research at Columbia University

Hotspots: Risk levels calculated by combining hazard exposure with historical vulnerability for two indicators of elements at risk-gridded population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per unit area-for six major natural hazards: earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, drought, and cyclones

Natural disaster profiles: Profiles for 13 countries provide information on sub-national areas at risk from natural hazards including cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and landslides.

Geographical coverage: Global for hotspots data

Time span: Recent past

Available at: Online here

Global Earthquake Model (GEM)

Data: GEM Global Historical Earthquake Catalogue (1000-1900) and the ISC-GEM Global Instrumental Earthquake Catalogue (1900-2009)

Geographical coverage:Global

Time span: 1000 onwards

Available at: Online here

ATSR World Fire Atlas - by the European Space Agency (ESA)

Data: Monthly global fire maps

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: 1995 onwards

Available at: Online at the website of ESA here

Unisys Data on Hurricanes

Data: Data on the track of the storm plus a text-based table of tracking information. The table includes position in latitude and longitude, maximum sustained winds in knots, and central pressure in millibars.

Geographical coverage: Atlantic, East Pacific, West Pacific, South Pacific, South Indian, and North Indian

Time span: 1851 until now

Available at: Online here

This data set was used by Dean Yang (2008) - Coping with Disaster: The Impact of Hurricanes on International Financial Flows, 1970-2002. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. Volume 8, Issue 1, ISSN (Online) 1935-1682, DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.1903, June 2008. Online here.

National Climatic Data Center (NOAA)

National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC)

Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program (GVP)

Data: Complete list of current and past activity for all volcanoes on the planet active during the last 10,000 years. Data includes eruption type, maximum Volcanic Explosivity Index, start and end dates (when known), and the type of evidence for the eruption.

Geographical coverage: Global

Time span: Past 10,000 years to present day

Available at: Online at the Volcanoes of the World Database

Full reference: Global Volcanism Program, 2013. Volcanoes of the World, v. 4.7.3. Venzke, E (ed.). Smithsonian Institution. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW4-2013

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All our interactive charts on Natural Disasters The number of deaths from natural disasters can be highly variable from year-to-year; some years pass with very few deaths before a large disaster event claims many lives. If we look at the average over the past decade, approximately 45,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year.

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Fewer people were executed in 2020 than in any year for nearly three decades, and fewer people were sentenced to die than at any point since the Supreme Court created the modern legal framework governing the death penalty in 1976. Those are two of the striking findings in the Death Penalty Information Center's (DPIC) annual report, which was released on December 16.

One significant reason so few people were executed in 2020 is the Covid-19 pandemic - which has slowed court proceedings and turned gathering prison officials and witnesses for an execution into a dangerous event for everyone involved. But even if 2020 is an outlier year due to the pandemic, DPIC's data shows a sharp and consistent trend away from the death penalty since the number of capital sentences peaked in the 1990s.

In total, only 17 people were executed in 2020, a number that would be much lower if not for the Trump administration resuming federal executions this year for the first time in nearly two decades. 2020 is the first year in American history when the federal government executed more people than all of the states combined: 10 of the 17 people executed in 2020 were killed by the federal government.

Only five states - Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee - conducted executions in 2020. And of these five states, only one, Texas, killed more than one person on death row.

The trend away from new death sentences and executions has continued despite two recent significant pro-death penalty opinions from the Supreme Court. The Court's decisions in Glossip v. Gross (2015) and especially in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019) make it much more difficult for death row inmates to claim their executions violate the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the longstanding trend away from the death penalty will eventually be reversed by the Court's new 6-3 Republican majority. For the moment, the trend appears to be robust even in the face of significant doctrinal shifts by the Supreme Court.

Why has the number of death sentences and executions declined so sharply?

There are many factors that likely contribute to the death penalty's decline. Among other things, crime fell sharply in recent decades - the number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters fell from nearly 25,000 in 1991 to less than 15,000 in 2010. Public support for the death penalty has also fallen sharply, from 80 percent in the mid-90s to just 55 percent in 2020, according to Gallup. And, beginning in the 1980s, many states enacted laws permitting the most serious offenders to be sentenced to life without parole instead of death - thus giving juries a way to remove such offenders from society without killing them.

Yet, as Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett argues in End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, these and similar factors can only partially explain why the death penalty is in decline. Murders, for example, "have declined modestly since 2000 (by about 10 percent)," Garrett writes. Yet "annual death sentences have fallen by 90 percent since their peak in the 1990s."

Garrett argues, persuasively, that one of the biggest factors driving the decline in death sentences is the fact that capital defendants typically receive far better legal representation today than they did a generation ago. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2001, " People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty."

The Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Though Furman produced a maze of concurring and dissenting opinions and no one opinion explaining the Court's rationale, many of the justices pointed to the arbitrary manner in which death sentences were doled out. The particular death sentences before the Court in Furman, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, "are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual" because death sentences appeared to be handed down to just a "random handful" of serious offenders.

Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court allowed states to resume sentencing serious offenders to death but only with adequate procedural safeguards. Gregg upheld a Georgia statute that allowed prosecutors to claim that a death sentence is warranted because certain "aggravating circumstances" are present, such as if the offender had a history of serious violent crime. Defense attorneys, in turn, could present the jury with "mitigating circumstances" that justified a lesser penalty, such as evidence that the defendant had a mental illness or was abused as a child. A death sentence was only warranted if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors.

This weighing test is now a centerpiece of capital trials in the United States, which means the primary job of a capital defense lawyer is often to humanize their client in the eyes of a jury. Defense counsel must explain how factors like an abusive upbringing, mental deficiencies, or personal tragedy led their client to commit a terrible crime.

Doing this well, Garrett argues, "takes a team." It requires investigators who can dig into a client's background, and it often requires social workers or other professionals who "have the time and the ability to elicit sensitive, embarrassing, and often humiliating evidence (e.g. family sexual abuse) that the defendant may have never disclosed."

And yet, especially in the years following Gregg, many states didn't provide even minimally competent legal counsel to capital defendants - much less a team that included a trained investigator and a social worker.

Virginia, for example, has executed more people since the Gregg decision than any state except for Texas. A major reason is that, for quite some time, Virginia only paid capital defense lawyers about $13 an hour, and a lawyer's total fee was capped at $650 per case.

In 2002, however, the state created four Regional Capital Defender offices. And, when state-employed defense teams couldn't represent a particular client, the state started paying private lawyers up to $200 an hour for in-court work and up to $150 an hour for out-of-court work. As a result, the number of death row inmates in Virginia fell from 50 in the 1990s to just five in 2017.

Virginia's experience, moreover, was hardly isolated. As Garrett notes, many states enacted laws in the last four decades that provided at least some defense resources to capital defendants.

And in states that did not provide adequate resources to defendants, several nonprofits emerged to pick up the slack. In Texas, for example, an organization called the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) was formed in response to a notorious case where a capital defense lawyer slept through much of his client's trial.

Some of these nonprofit lawyers have become minor celebrities within the legal profession. At least one, Bryan Stevenson, is arguably a celebrity well beyond the world of attorneys - Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan in the movie Just Mercy.

Capital defendants, in other words, are much less likely to be left alone - or practically alone with an incompetent lawyer - during a trial that will decide if they live or die. And that means that they are far more likely to convince a jury that mitigating factors justify a sentence other than death.

The future of the death penalty is now very uncertain thanks to the Supreme Court's new majority

Cases like Furman and Gregg are rooted in the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits " cruel and unusual punishments." This amendment's use of the word "unusual" suggests that the kinds of punishments forbidden by the Constitution should change over time, as certain punishments fall out of favor in society and thus become more unusual. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Trop v. Dulles(1958), the Eighth Amendment "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

Under this framework, there's a very strong argument that the death penalty is unconstitutional. After all, if a punishment becomes more constitutionally dubious as it becomes less common, what should we make of a punishment that was only carried out 17 times in the last year and that has been used less and less frequently over the last three decades?

The Supreme Court, however, almost certainly cut off any chance that this argument could prevail in its 5-4 decision in Bucklew.

Although Bucklew does not explicitly overrule the long line of Supreme Court decisions applying Warren's "evolving standards of decency" test, Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion in Bucklew ignores that framework altogether and substitutes a different, much more narrow approach to the Eighth Amendment.

"Death was 'the standard penalty for all serious crimes' at the time of the founding," Gorsuch wrote in Bucklew. And, while his opinion does list some methods of execution - "dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive" - that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch argues that these methods of execution were unconstitutional because "by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become 'unusual.'"

Warren's framework, in other words, asks whether a particular punishment has fallen out of favor today. Gorsuch's framework, by contrast, asks whether a particular punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. That's a sea change in Eighth Amendment doctrine and one that could have profound implications for the death penalty.

It's not yet clear how far the Court will take its recent opinion in Bucklew. Bucklew was a case about whether a state could use a particularly agonizing method to execute someone sentenced to death. That makes it distinct from cases like Gregg, which ask whether certain individuals can be given a death sentence in the first place.

It's possible that the Supreme Court's current majority will leave in place the Gregg framework, with its mandatory weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors, while also giving states more leeway to decide how to execute someone once a death sentence is handed down.

At the very least, though, Bucklew suggests that many members of the Supreme Court object to some of the foundational principles that guided Eighth Amendment cases for many decades. And that they are eager to make significant doctrinal changes to the constitutional law governing criminal punishments.

The future of the death penalty is highly uncertain. But Bucklew gives capital defense lawyers plenty of reasons to fear that future.

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The decline and fall of the American death penalty

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Fewer people were executed in 2020 than in any year for nearly three decades, and fewer people were sentenced to die than at any point since the Supreme Court created the modern legal framework governing the death penalty in 1976.

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https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields

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Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century

Agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa needs to improve to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity.

Hannah Ritchie

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Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.

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Ensuring that all girls and young women receive a quality education is their human right, a global development priority, and a strategic priority for the World Bank.

Achieving gender equality is central to the World Bank Group twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. As the largest financing development partner in education globally, the World Bank ensures that all of its education projects are gender-sensitive, and works to overcome barriers that are preventing girls and boys from equally benefiting from countries' investments in education.

Girls' education goes beyond getting girls into school. It is also about ensuring that girls learn and feel safe while in school; have the opportunity to complete all levels of education, acquiring the knowledge and skills to compete in the labor market; gain socio-emotional and life skills necessary to navigate and adapt to a changing world; make decisions about their own lives; and contribute to their communities and the world.

Both individuals and countries benefit from girls' education. Better educated women tend to be more informed about nutrition and healthcare, have fewer children, marry at a later age, and their children are usually healthier, should they choose to become mothers. They are more likely to participate in the formal labor market and earn higher incomes. A recent World Bank study estimates that the "limited educational opportunities for girls, and barriers to completing 12 years of education, cost countries between US$15 trillion1 and $30 trillion in lost lifetime productivity and earnings." All these factors combined can help lift households, communities, and countries out of poverty.
The Challenge
According to UNESCO estimates, around the world, 129 million girls are out of school, including 32 million of primary school age, and 97 million of secondary school age.

Globally, primary, and secondary school enrollment rates are getting closer to equal for girls and boys (90% male, 89% female). But while enrollment rates are similar - in fact, two-thirds of all countries have reached gender parity in primary school enrollment - completion rates for girls are lower in low-income countries where 63% of female primary school students complete primary school, compared to 67% of male primary school students. In low-income countries, secondary school completion rates for girls also continue to lag, with only 36% of girls completing lower secondary school compared to 44% of boys. Upper secondary completion rates have similar disparities in lower income countries, the rate is 26% for young men and 21% for young women.

The gaps are starker in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV). In FCV countries, girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school than boys, and at the secondary level, are 90% more likely to be out of secondary school than those in non-FCV contexts.

Both girls and boys are facing a learning crisis. Learning Poverty (LP) measures the share of children who are not able to read proficiently at age 10. While girls are on average 4 percentage points less learning-poor than boys, the rates remain very high for both groups. The average of Learning Poverty in in low- and middle- income countries is 55% for females, and 59% for males. The gap is narrower in low-income countries, where Learning Poverty averages about 93% for both boys and girls.

In many countries, enrollment in tertiary education slightly favors young women, however, better learning outcomes are not translating into better work and life outcomes for women. There is a large gender gap in labor force participation rates globally. It is especially stark in regions such as South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, which have some of the lowest female labor force participation rates at 24% and 20% per region, respectively. These are appallingly low rates, considering what is observed in other regions like Latin America (53%) or East Asia (59%), which are still below rates for men.

Gender bias within schools and classrooms may also reinforce messages that affect girls' ambitions, their own perceptions of their roles in society, and produce labor market engagement disparities and occupational segregation. When gender stereotypes are communicated through the design of school and classroom learning environments or through the behavior of faculty, staff, and peers in a child's school, it goes on to have sustained impact on academic performance and choice of field of study, especially negatively affecting young women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

Poverty is one of the most important factors for determining whether a girl can access and complete her education. Studies consistently reinforce that girls who face multiple disadvantages - such as low family income, living in remote or underserved locations or who have a disability or belong to a minority ethno-linguistic group - are farthest behind in terms of access to and completion of education.

Violence also prevents girls from accessing and completing education - often girls are forced to walk long distances to school placing them at an increased risk of violence and many experience violence while at school. Most recent data estimates that approximately 60 million girls are sexually assaulted on their way to or at school every year. This often has serious consequences for their mental and physical health and overall well-being while also leading to lower attendance and higher dropout rates. An estimated 246 million children experience violence in and around school every year, ending school-related gender-based violence is critical. Adolescent pregnancies can be a result of sexual violence or sexual exploitation. Girls who become pregnant often face strong stigma, and even discrimination, from their communities. The burden of stigma, compounded by unequal gender norms, can lead girls to drop out of school early and not return.

Child marriage is also a critical challenge. Girls who marry young are much more likely to drop out of school, complete fewer years of education than their peers who marry later. They are also more likely to have children at a young age and are exposed to higher levels of violence perpetrated by their partner. In turn, this affects the education and health of their children, as well as their ability to earn a living. Indeed, girls with secondary schooling are up to six times more likely to marry as those children with little or no education. According to a recent report, more than 41,000 girls under the age of 18 marry every day. Putting an end to this practice would increase women's expected educational attainment, and with it, their potential earnings. According to the report's estimates, ending child marriage could generate more than US$500 billion in benefits annually each year.

COVID-19 is having a negative impact on girls' health and well-being - and many are at risk of not returning to school once they reopen. Available research shows that prevalence of violence against girls and women has increased during the pandemic - jeopardizing their health, safety and overall well-being. As school closures and quarantines were enforced during the 2014‐2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, women and girls experienced more sexual violence, coercion and exploitation. School closures during the Ebola outbreak were associated with an increase in teenage pregnancies. Once schools re-opened, many "visibly pregnant girls" were banned from going back to school. With schools closing throughout the developing world, where stigma around teenage pregnancies prevails, we will probably see an increase in drop-out rates as teenage girls become pregnant or married. As girls stay at home because of school closures, their household work burdens might increase, resulting in girls spending more time helping out at home instead of studying. This might encourage parents, particularly those putting a lower value on girls' education, to keep their daughters at home even after schools reopen. Moreover, research shows that girls risk dropping out of school when caregivers are missing from the household because they typically have to (partly) replace the work done by the missing caregiver, who might be away due to COVID-19-related work, illness, or death. Therefore, with the current COVID-19 pandemic, we might see more girls than boys helping at home, lagging behind with studying, and dropping out of school.

Last Updated: Feb 10, 2022

The World Bank is committed to seeing every girl prosper in her life. Our projects support the education of hundreds of millions of girls and young women across the world. Working through interventions in education, health, social protection, water, infrastructure, and other sectors, we are making an even stronger commitment to support countries in ensuring that every girl receives the quality education she deserves.

Our 180 projects are impacting more than 150 million girls and young women worldwide. Hundreds of millions more have been impacted over the past few decades.

We tackle key barriers that girls and young women face when trying to obtain an education. Guided by evidence on what works for girls' education, our projects use multi-pronged approaches across areas including:
1. Removing barriers to schooling

Addressing financial barriers, through scholarships, stipends, grants, conditional cash transfers

Addressing long distances and lack of safety to and from school by building schools, providing transportation methods for girls to get to school

Addressing a lack of information about returns to girls' education but running community awareness campaigns engaging parents, school leaders, and local community leaders

Working with the community to address and inform on social and cultural norms and perceptions that may prevent girls' education

2. Promoting safe and inclusive schools

By constructing and rehabilitating schools to create safe and inclusive learning environments,

Efforts at the community- and school-levels, and programs to engage the school (including teachers, girls, and boys) in reducing gender-based violence (GBV) and ensuring available mechanisms to report GBV

Support for hygiene facilities and menstrual hygiene management for adolescent girls

3. Improving the quality of education

Investing in teacher professional development, eliminating gender biases in curriculum and teaching practices, and focusing on foundational learning

Adapting teaching and learning materials, and books to introduce gender sensitive language, pictorial aspects, and messaging

4. Developing skills and empowering girls for life and labor market success

Promoting girls' empowerment, skills development programs and social programs

Prioritizing and promoting women in STEM subjects and careers in both traditional and non-traditional sectors

Reducing barriers and providing incentives through scholarships for women to enroll in higher education and TVET programs

Support for childcare programs for women and girls to join the labor market

For more information on our girls' education investment and projects, please read Count Me In: The World Bank Education Global Practice: Improving Education Outcomes for Girls and Women, which highlights our decades-long commitment to girls' education, and showcases how Education GP projects are creating opportunities for girls around the world to succeed in their education and beyond.
Last Updated: Oct 26, 2021

The WBG supports girls' education through a variety of interventions. Our focus on girls' education and wellbeing goes beyond school attendance and learning outcomes - we strive to ensure girls have safe, joyful, and inclusive experience with education systems that set them up for success in life and motivate them to become lifelong learners. This approach, reflected in the current Education portfolio impacting at least 150 million girls and young women, prioritizes investments in four key areas listed below.
1. Removing barriers to girls' schooling

Our projects providing stipends to improve primary and secondary school completion for girls and young women in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Sahel benefit close to half a million girls.

Our Girls Empowerment and Learning for All Project in Angola will use a variety of financial incentives to attract adolescent girls to schools, including scholarships, and new school spaces for girls.

The AGILE (Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment) project in Nigeria is providing conditional cash transfers to households for sending girls to school, removing cost barriers to their education.

The MIQRA (Mali Improving Education Quality and Results for All Project) has a school feeding and nutrition program targeted at retention and attendance for girls in schools.

2. Promoting safe and inclusive schools for girls

In Tanzania, the Bank is supporting the training of a counselor in every school who will provide life-skills training in girls' and boys' clubs - which is important because closing gender gaps is not only about interventions for girls but also for boys.

In Nigeria, female counselors will provide life skills training to about 340,000 girls in safe spaces. Several of our other projects also support the construction of separate sanitary toilets for girls, as well as introducing GBV-reducing and reporting mechanisms in school systems.

3. Improving the quality of education for girls (and boys)

In Ghana, the Accountability and Learning Outcomes Project is conducting teacher training for gender-sensitive instruction, and aims to create guides for teachers to support gender sensitivity in classrooms.

In Honduras, the Early Childhood Education Improvement Project, will create a revised preschool curriculum that will include content on gender equity, inclusion, and violence prevention, as well as training for teachers, including training to combat GBV.

The Girls Empowerment and Quality Education for All Project in Sao Tome & Principe is creating girls' clubs after school, where they are also provided with life skills training, and counseling.

4. Developing skills for life and labor market success for young women

The Nurturing Excellence in Higher Education Project in Nepal is focusing on increasing access to tertiary education for young women from low-income groups, and additional providing scholarships for the poorest applications, alongside communication and advocacy campaigns for more female enrollment in STEM subjects.

The ASSET (Accelerating and Strengthening Skills for Economic Transformation) project in Bangladesh is working to increase the participation of women in skills training programs, and conducting awareness and communications campaigns to address dropout.

In Pakistan, the Higher Education Development project seeks to support women enrolled in STEM programs, with an aim to move them from 2-year to more comprehensive 4-year programs.

The Higher Education Project in Moldova and the Higher Education Modernization Project in Belarus will both support and finance activities to increase enrollment of women in STEM fields. The Côte d'Ivoire Higher Education Development Support Project provides scholarships for women in higher education, and extra tutoring support for females pursuing STEM subjects.

Schemes to increase participation of girls in higher education. Through the Africa Centers of Excellence (ACE) project, the Bank has supported increased enrollment of females in masters and PhD programs. The number of female students in ACE centers was 343 in 2014 and is now 3,400 in 2020; a tenfold increase. The Bank is also building the pipeline of female students interested in computer science and engineering programs and retain them.

For more information on our girls' education investment and projects, please read Count Me In: The World Bank Education Global Practice: Improving Education Outcomes for Girls and Women, which highlights our decades-long commitment to girls' education, and showcases how Education GP projects are creating opportunities for girls around the world to succeed in their education and beyond.
Last Updated: Oct 26, 2021

The WBG works closely with governments and other development organizations on girls' education issues to identify and advance interventions that improve girls' education outcomes and provide resources to support countries implementing such initiatives. Partnerships both within and outside of the World Bank are critical to the Education GP's work on girls' education. The Education GP works with other global practices in the Bank to improve girls' education-for example, collaborating with the Water GP for access to sanitation and hygiene in schools, with Social Protection and Jobs GP for challenges related to labor market transition, or Energy GP to improve school safety.

The World Bank collaborates actively with many donors and organizations. As a signatory to the G7 Charlevoix Commitment, the Bank has already committed an estimated $2.5 billion to girls' education in FCV countries as of September 2021-exceeding its pledge of $2.0 billion from 2018 to 2023.

The Education GP:

is collaborating with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office FCDO (UK) about targets and high-level engagement with G7 donors, to support aid and financial commitment for girls' education;

is a member of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Girls' EiE Reference Group, which seeks to further research and advocacy for girls' education in emergencies;

a member of the UNESCO Gender Flagship Reference Group and has provided technical contributions to the UNESCO-commissioned study (December 2020-July 2021); and

is working closely with the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) as the implementing agency for 54 percent of the total GPE grants of $3.62 billion, that support girls' education.

is a member of the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), which comprises over 20 partners representing multilateral, bilateral, civil society, and non-governmental organizations.

collaborated with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) to produce Economic Impacts of Child Marriage, a recent report detailing the effects of child marriage, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, and GPE.

Last Updated: Oct 26, 2021

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Ensuring that all girls and young women receive a quality education is their human right, a global development priority, and a strategic priority for the World Bank. Achieving gender equality is central to the World Bank Group twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.

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New data shows a surge in overdose deaths involving fentanyl and methamphetamine. Overall, the nation saw a 15 percent increase in deaths from overdoses in 2021.

Mary DiAntonio kissed a portrait of her son Angelo DiAntonio in August at a memorial for overdose victims in Pittsburgh. Credit... Nate Guidry/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via AP

WASHINGTON - After a catastrophic increase in 2020, deaths from drug overdoses rose again to record-breaking levels in 2021, nearing 108,000, the result of an ever-worsening fentanyl crisis, according to preliminary new data published on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The increase of nearly 15 percent followed a much steeper rise of almost 30 percent in 2020, an unrelenting crisis that has consumed federal and state drug policy officials. Since the 1970s, the number of drug overdose deaths has increased every year except 2018.

A growing share of deaths continue to come from overdoses involving fentanyl, a class of potent synthetic opioids that are often mixed with other drugs, and methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant. State health officials battling an influx of both drugs said many of the deaths appeared to be the result of combining the two.

Drug overdoses, which long ago surged above the country's peak deaths from AIDS, car crashes and guns, killed about a quarter as many Americans last year as Covid-19.

Deaths involving synthetic opioids - largely fentanyl - rose to 71,000 from 58,000, while those associated with stimulants like methamphetamine, which has grown cheaper and more lethal in recent years, increased to 33,000 from 25,000. Because fentanyl is a white powder, it can be easily combined with other drugs, including opioids like heroin, and stimulants like meth and cocaine, and can be stamped into counterfeit pills for anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax. Such mixtures can prove lethal if drug users are unaware they are taking fentanyl or are unsure of the dose.

Deaths from both classes of drugs have been rising in recent years.

But there is growing evidence that mixing stimulants and opioids - into combinations known as "speedballs" and "goofballs" - is becoming more common, too. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies drug markets, has just begun a multiyear study of the combination of opioids and meth.

"There's an intertwined synthetics epidemic the likes of which we've never seen," he said. "We've never seen a powerful opioid such as fentanyl being mixed with such a potent methamphetamine."

The numbers released on Wednesday are considered provisional, and may change as the government reviews more death records. But they showed that a crisis that escalated sharply during the first year of the pandemic does not appear to be letting up.

Regina LaBelle, an addiction policy expert at Georgetown University, said that while the nearly 108,000 estimated deaths were without precedent, the smaller increase relative to 2020 was a "hopeful sign."

"One year doesn't make a trend," she said. "We're going to have to look at a few years in a row."

The White House in recent weeks announced President Biden's first national drug control strategy, and a plan to combat meth use was unveiled last week by his drug czar, Dr. Rahul Gupta, the first medical doctor to oversee the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Overdose deaths involving meth almost tripled between 2015 and 2019 in people 18 to 64, according to the National Institutes of Health.

"It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock," Dr. Gupta said in a statement on Wednesday.

Mr. Biden is the first president to embrace harm reduction, an approach that has been criticized by some as enabling drug users, but praised by addiction experts as a way to keep drug users alive while providing access to treatment and support.

Instead of pushing abstinence, the approach aims to lower the risk of dying or acquiring infectious diseases by offering sterile equipment - through needle exchanges, for example - or tools to check drugs for the presence of fentanyl. Strips that can detect fentanyl have become increasingly valuable resources for local health officials, and some states have moved recently to decriminalize them, even as others resist.

Recent settlements with prescription opioid manufacturers and distributors will soon bring new resources to states battling the overdose epidemic.

The causes of the continued increase in overdoses are complex and hard to untangle, experts said. But state health officials and some addiction experts said the spike in overdoses, which began before the pandemic, could not be blamed solely on the disruptions that came with it, or on a major increase in the number of Americans using drugs.

Social isolation and economic dislocation, which have been widespread during the pandemic, do tend to cause relapses in drug use, and could have contributed to rising overdoses. Shutdowns early in 2020 also caused some addiction treatment providers to temporarily close their doors. But the pandemic alone does not explain the recent trend.

Policy changes made during the pandemic may have helped prevent more deaths. Ms. LaBelle, the Georgetown addiction expert, said early research had found that loosening rules to permit take-home methadone treatment had been beneficial, along with an increase in treatment via telemedicine.

"The difference in what we're seeing now is not how many people are using," said Dr. Anne Zink, the chief health official in Alaska, which saw the largest overdose death percentage increase of any state in the nation, according to the data released on Wednesday.

Instead, she said, the fentanyl supply had skyrocketed, in shipments that were difficult to track, penetrating even the most isolated parts of the state. Of the 140 fentanyl overdose deaths the state recorded in 2021, over 60 percent also involved meth, and nearly 30 percent involved heroin.

Drug overdoses, which long ago surged above the country's peak deaths from AIDS, car crashes and guns, killed about a quarter as many Americans last year as Covid-19. Credit... Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Fentanyl, which is made in a lab, can be cheaper and easier to produce and distribute than heroin, enhancing its appeal to dealers and traffickers. But because it is strong and sold in varying formulations, small disparities in quantity can mean the difference between a drug user's usual dose and one that proves deadly. It is particularly dangerous when it is consumed unwittingly by drug users who do not usually take opioids. The spread of fentanyl into an ever-growing portion of the nation's drug supply has continued to flummox even states with strong addiction-treatment services.

Often synthesized in Mexico from precursor chemicals made in China, fentanyl long ago permeated the heroin markets of the Northeast and the Midwest. But recent data shows it has established a strong hold in the South and the West as well.

"The economics of fentanyl have just been pushing the other drugs out of the market," said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. "It's just so cheap to buy fentanyl and turn around and put it in whatever."

Across Alaska, Dr. Zink said, fentanyl kills many overdose victims before bystanders or emergency responders can revive them with naloxone, a medication that can quickly reverse an opioid overdose.

"You don't have a second chance if you don't immediately have naloxone available," she said.

A recent study of illicit pills seized by drug enforcement authorities found that a substantial share of what is marketed as OxyContin, Xanax or the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug Adderall now contains fentanyl. The spread of these counterfeit pills may explain a recent sharp increase in overdose deaths among teenagers, who are less likely to inject drugs than older people.

Pat Allen, the Oregon Health Authority director, said that, as was the case in other states with surging overdose deaths, the clear difference in 2021 had been the ubiquity of fentanyl. Children as young as 12 are considered at high risk of obtaining counterfeit pills containing fentanyl, and high schoolers are overdosing on them, believing they are opioid painkillers or anti-anxiety medication. The state was working to send naloxone tool kits to schools, similar to a program it has used in fast food restaurants, where people were overdosing in bathrooms.

Mr. Allen said he had seen an alarming phenomenon among those who overdose: They perceive the risk of fentanyl to be low, even though the actual risk is "gravely higher."

"We've had an addiction issue in Oregon which we've known about for a long time," he said. "This takes that existing addiction issue and makes it much more dangerous."

In 2021, overdoses amounted to one of the leading causes of death in the United States, similar to the number of people who died from diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, and roughly a quarter of the number of people who died from Covid-19, the third leading cause of death, according to the C.D.C.

In Vermont, which saw one of the biggest increases in overdose deaths last year, 93 percent of opioid deaths were fentanyl-related, according to Kelly Dougherty, the state's deputy health commissioner.

"In the beginning stages of the pandemic, we were attributing the increase to life being disrupted," she said. But now, she added, a different explanation seems clear: "What is really the primary driver is the presence of fentanyl in the drug supply."

The state's celebrated "hub and spoke" model of addiction treatment and its aggressive use of medication-assisted treatment programs, she said, were not enough to contend with the ease and speed with which people overdose on fentanyl.

"You can have the most robust treatment system," she said, "and not everybody is going to avail themselves of it when maybe they should, or before they end up overdosing."

And fentanyl is showing up in counterfeit pills, Ms. Dougherty said, including in OxyContin.

She said Vermont officials had taken up new public messaging regarding fentanyl.

"Just assume that it's everywhere," she said.

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Overdose Deaths Continue Rising, With Fentanyl and Meth Key Culprits

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New data shows a surge in overdose deaths involving fentanyl and methamphetamine. Overall, the nation saw a 15 percent increase in deaths from overdoses in 2021. WASHINGTON - After a catastrophic increase in 2020, deaths from drug overdoses rose again to record-breaking levels in 2021, nearing 108,000, the result of an ever-worsening fentanyl crisis, according to preliminary new data published on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/18/

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Common Misconceptions

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How much of the world's economy comes from agriculture, forestry and fishing?

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Women's right to vote increasing globally

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A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Soweto in April 1994 for South Africa's first free and democratic general election. (Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)

This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees women the right to vote. But the United States was hardly the first country to codify women's suffrage, and barriers to vote persisted for some groups of U.S. women for decades. At least 20 nations preceded the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center analysis of women's enfranchisement measures in 198 countries and self-administering territories. Today, none of these 198 countries and territories bar women from voting because of their sex; some countries do not hold national elections.

Here is a closer look at the history of women's suffrage around the world. This analysis focuses on when women in each country won the right to vote in national elections, not regional or local elections.

A century after U.S. women gained the right to vote, we conducted this analysis to find out when women in other countries were first enfranchised at the national level. The analysis is based on information about 198 countries and self-administering territories from government publications, historical documents from organizations like the United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and news reports. For each country or territory, the year in which women received the right is based on the date this right was codified in a law or constitution or officially granted as part of a United Nations plebiscite. The analysis looks only at when women gained the right to vote in national elections, not in regional or local elections. In some cases, data about when these measures were passed is incomplete, contradicted in other publications or difficult to find, so this analysis is as complete and accurate as possible within our research limitations.

Saudi Arabia and Brunei do not hold national elections, and Hong Kong and Macau do not participate in China's elections. In all four of these jurisdictions, women are able to vote in local elections.

The 198 countries and self-administering territories covered by this analysis are home to more than 99.5% of the world's population. They include 192 of the 193 member states of the United Nations (data for North Korea is not included), plus six self-administering territories: Kosovo, Hong Kong, Macau, the Palestinian territories, Taiwan and Western Sahara. Reporting on these territories does not imply any position on what their international political status should be, only recognition that the de facto situations in these territories require separate analysis.

New Zealand enfranchised its female citizens in 1893, making it the first nation or territory to formally allow women to vote in national elections. At least 19 other countries also did so prior to the U.S. passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, according to our analysis. These countries are spread across Europe and Asia, and about half first gave women this right while under Russian or Soviet control or shortly after independence from Russia. Russia itself extended the vote to women after demonstrations in 1917.

In at least eight additional countries, some women - but not all - gained equal voting rights in or before 1920.

More than half of the countries and territories we analyzed (129 out of 198) granted women the right to vote between 1893 and 1960. This includes all but six European nations. Some of the European nations that allowed universal suffrage after 1960 include Switzerland (1971), Portugal (1976) and Liechtenstein (1984).

In other world regions, women secured the right to vote in national elections only after major cultural or governmental shifts. For example, 80% of the countries in Africa we analyzed granted citizens universal suffrage between 1950 and 1975 - a period of sweeping European decolonization for the continent (as well for parts of Asia and Latin America). Many newly independent nations adopted universal suffrage along with new governments and constitutions.

Bhutan, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are the most recent countries or territories to allow women to participate in national elections, although the picture is complicated. Bhutan and the UAE only established national elections recently. Bhutan shifted from a monarchy to a parliamentary democracy in 2007. The UAE allowed a small number of male and female citizens to vote in the country's first national elections in 2006. In Kuwait, the country's Parliament amended an election law in 2005; the change guaranteed women the right to vote and run for office.

In Saudi Arabia, women were enfranchised in local elections in 2015; the country does not hold national elections. South Sudan was established in 2011. It is not included among the most recent countries to give women the right to vote because women had this right starting in 1964, when the area was part of Sudan.

At least 19 nations - including the U.S. - initially restricted the right to vote for women of certain backgrounds based on demographic factors such as race, age, education level or marital status. Sometimes, decades passed before all citizens were enfranchised. In the U.S., for example, more than four decades passed between the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which took aim at discriminatory state and local restrictions intended to prevent Black Americans from voting.

Restrictions like these weren't unique to the U.S. In Canada, for example, legislation in 1918 expanded suffrage to women, but it excluded Canadians from Asian Canadian and Indigenous backgrounds. Asian Canadians were not fully enfranchised until the 1940s, and Indigenous people could not vote until 1960.

In Australia, Indigenous women were not enfranchised until 1962, six decades after non-Indigenous women were able to vote. In South Africa, more than 60 years passed between when White women won voting rights in 1930 and when Black women won them in 1993, following the end of apartheid.

When India first expanded voting rights to women in 1935, only those who were married to a male voter, or possessed specific literacy qualifications, could vote. Universal suffrage followed in 1950.

Some countries also initially set a higher minimum age for women voters than for their male counterparts. In 1915, for example, Icelandic women over age 40 gained the right to vote. Five years later, the voting age for women was lowered to 25, in line with the requirement for men.

Legal and cultural restrictions limited women's voter participation in some countries and territories even after enfranchisement. Ecuador, for instance, became the first Latin American country to grant women voting rights in 1929, but it only extended the franchise to literate Ecuadorian women, and voting was not mandatory for women as it was for men. A new constitution in 1967 made voting mandatory for literate women, and it wasn't until 1979 that the literacy requirement was dropped completely. Several other countries, such as Hungary and Guatemala, also imposed literacy requirements on women voters that were lifted later.

More recently, Samoa's government system allowed only those with chiefly titles, known as matai, to vote in parliamentary elections, effectively excluding women from the vote. The island nation adopted universal suffrage in 1990.

In some places, women were able to vote in local elections before they were enfranchised at the national level - or vice versa. In Switzerland, for example, women secured the right to vote in national elections in 1971 but had been able to vote locally in some cantons, or states, since 1959. But in another canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, women were only given the right to vote in local elections after a 1990 federal court ruling.

Few countries and territories have rescinded women's voting rights after initially granting them, but there are some notable exceptions. Afghanistan, for instance, was an early adopter of women's suffrage after winning independence from Britain in 1919. Government shifts and instability over the next almost 100 years resulted in women losing and formally regaining the right to participate in elections several times. Women have the right to vote in Afghanistan today, but there are still barriers in place that limit their participation.

In many countries, including the U.S., women often turn out to vote at higher rates than men. American women have turned out to vote at slightly higher rates than men in every U.S. presidential election since 1984, according to a Pew Research Center analysis in August. The same pattern appears in other countries, too. A 2016 study of voting patterns in 58 countries by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that women's voter turnout was higher than men's in 21 countries.

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Key facts about women's suffrage around the world, a century after U.S. ratified 19th Amendment

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This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees women the right to vote. But the United States was hardly the first country to codify women's suffrage, and barriers to vote persisted for some groups of U.S. women for decades.

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that the rate of poor people go down in the past few years

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Common Misconceptions

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How much of the excess heat from global warming is captured in the oceans?

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Six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today, up 9 percentage points from spring 2022.

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Interactive information on suicide

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Secondary education for girls can transform communities, countries and our world.
It is an investment in economic growth, a healthier workforce, lasting peace and the future of our planet. That's why Malala Fund advocates - at the local, national and international levels - for resources and policy changes that improve access to education for girls.

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It is an investment in economic growth, a healthier workforce, lasting peace and the future of our planet. That's why Malala Fund advocates - at the local, national and international levels - for resources and policy changes that improve access to education for girls.

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the management of soil waste - clara

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - After a spike in ozone levels and a growing ozone hole in the stratosphere in 2000, there has been a slow decrease in size over the past ten years.

Due to an environmental agreement called the Montreal Protocol, the amount of chlorine and bromine in the atmosphere has been greatly reduced, which has resulted in the overall shrinking of the ozone layer hole. Levels have fallen 16% since 2000.

The Antarctic ozone hole forms during the Southern Hemisphere's late winter. This is because of more sunshine due to the sun angle, which causes ozone-depleting reactions. These reactions involve chemically active forms of chlorine and bromine, which are man-made compounds. In warmer temperatures, fewer polar stratospheric clouds form and they don't persist as long, which limits the ozone-depletion process.

According to NASA, the smallest ozone hole on record was in 2019. This was because of warmer atmospheric conditions in Antarctica that year.

2020 will mark the 12th largest ozone hole on record, but levels are still notably lower with this year being the 14th lowest for ozone levels in 33 years. The difference in size between 2019 and 2020 shows how weather conditions and varying temperatures impact the ozone hole.
Copyright 2020 WMC. All rights reserved.

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Breakdown: Why the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - After a spike in ozone levels and a growing ozone hole in the stratosphere in 2000, there has been a slow decrease in size over the past ten years. Due to an environmental agreement called the Montreal Protocol, the amount of chlorine and bromine in the atmosphere has been greatly reduced, which has resulted in the overall shrinking of the ozone layer hole.

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Many international organizations use access to safe drinking water and safely managed sanitation facilities as a measure of progress against poverty, disease, and death. Access to these services by every man, woman, and child is also considered a human right, not a privilege. Though progress has been made to provide safe drinking water and sanitation to people throughout the world, billions of people still lack access to these services every day.

Drinking Water Sources

According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, 90% of the world's population used at least basic drinking water services, increasing from 88% in 2015. If current trends continue, the world will reach 94% coverage by 2030.

Over the first five years of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), urban drinking water coverage has stayed at 96%, and rural drinking water coverage has increased from 79% to 82%. By 2020, 84 countries accomplished universal access to at least basic drinking water services. However, many millions of people remain without access to basic drinking water services.

Access to safe drinking water is defined as the percentage of the population having access to and using improved drinking water sources.

Difference between improved and unimproved drinking water sources

Improved drinking water sources should, but do not always, provide safe drinking water, and include:

Piped household water connection

Public standpipe

Borehole or tubewell

Protected dug well

Protected spring

Rainwater collection

Packaged or delivered water

Unimproved drinking water sources include:

Unprotected dug well

Unprotected spring

Surface water (river, dam, lake, pond, stream, canal, irrigation channel)

Vendor-provided water (cart with small tank/drum, tanker truck)

Bottled water*

Tanker truck water

* Bottled water is not considered improved due to limitations in the potential quantity, not quality, of the water.

Sanitation Facilities

Many countries face challenges in providing adequate sanitation for their entire populations, leaving people at risk for diseases related to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Worldwide, an estimated 1.7 billion people lack basic sanitation (about 21% of the world's population). Basic sanitation is defined as having access to facilities for the safe disposal of human waste (feces and urine), as well as having the ability to maintain hygienic conditions, through services such as garbage collection, industrial and hazardous waste management, and wastewater treatment and disposal. Around 2.3 billion people (about 29% of the world population) lack access to basic hygiene, which includes access to a handwashing station with soap and water at home.

The United Nations' Millennium Development Goal (MDG) sanitation target to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to basic sanitation by 2015 was not achieved. Today, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) aims for everyone to have "adequate and equitable" sanitation and basic hygiene by 2030.

Access to sanitation is defined as the percentage of the population which has access and are using improved sanitation facilities.

Difference between improved, shared, and unimproved sanitation systems

Improved sanitation facilities usually ensure separation of human excreta from human contact, and include:

Flush or pour-flush toilet/latrine to:

Piped sewer system

Septic tank

Pit latrine

Ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrine

Pit latrine with slab

Composting toilet

Shared sanitation facilities are otherwise acceptable improved sanitation facilities that are shared between two or more households. Shared facilities include public toilets.

Unimproved sanitation facilities do not ensure hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact and include:

Pit latrine without a slab or platform

Hanging latrine

Bucket latrine

Open defecation in fields, forests, bushes, bodies of water or other open spaces, or disposal of human feces with solid waste

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centers for disease control and prevention

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Many international organizations use access to safe drinking water and safely managed sanitation facilities as a measure of progress against poverty, disease, and death. Access to these services by every man, woman, and child is also considered a human right, not a privilege.

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https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.LND.PTLD.ZS

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https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-procedure/recent-death-penalty-statistics.html#:~:text=Most%20Recent%20Death%20Penalty%20Statistics,people%20were%20executed%20in%202016.

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The death penalty has been and remains a contentious topic. Whether the state has the right to take a person's life is a question that raises moral, spiritual, political, and economic concerns. For a short period in the early to mid 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court put a moratorium on executions, ruling that the death penalty statutes of many states were unconstitutional, although it later reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

As a result, many states rewrote their death penalty statutes and resumed death sentences and executions. However, executions began to decline again in the 21st Century, as recent death penalty statistics show.

How are Executions Performed?

The technology and methods involved in state-run executions have changed significantly over the years. For the first 150 years of the country's existence, prisoners were executed either by hanging or by firing squad. That changed in the 1880s when the electric chair was invented. Electrocution became the standard method for executions until 1982, when lethal injection was used for the first time.

As of the early 21st Century, lethal injections remain the preferred method for execution. Although other methods are occasionally used (including the electric chair as an option in Alabama, Florida, and four other states), the vast majority of executions are performed by lethal injection.

However, many of the drug companies that manufacture the substances used in lethal injections have sued to stop states from using their drugs in this manner. Others simply stopped making those particular drugs. As a result, some states (most notably Nebraska) were left without the means to carry out scheduled executions.

Who Gets Executed?

The number and type of executions vary from year to year and from state to state. Since the invention of the lethal injection procedure in 1982, an average of forty-six people were executed per year. This pace has slowed to fewer than thirty inmates a year executed in the last decade.

Approximately half of those people executed were white, one third were African-Americans, and the remainder were of other races. The overwhelming majority of executed individuals have been men; fewer than one percent of people executed during that time have been women.

Most Recent Death Penalty Statistics

A total of 1491 convicts have been executed in the United States since 1976, with 23 in 2017 and 25 in 2018. The annual number of executions had been in decline since 2009, when there 52, but began to rise after only 20 people were executed in 2016. The following death penalty statistics are from the Death Penalty Information Center, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other sources.

There were 164 death row exonerations (using DNA and other evidence) between 1973 and 2018, an average of 5 per year.

As of April 1, 2018, California had the most death row inmates with 740, followed by Florida with 353, and Texas with 232, with a total of 2,738 death row inmates.

Of those on death row, as of April 1, 2018, 42% are African-American, 42% are Caucasian, 13% are Hispanic, and 3% are classified as "other."

Between 1967 and 2018, Texas has executed the most prisoners with 559, followed by Virginia with 113. Although California has the highest number of prisoners on death row, the state has only executed a total of 13 prisoners in total.

As of July 1, 2017, there were 53 women on death row.

Capital punishment, despite being limited to 13 prisoners so far, has cost California roughly $4 billion since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978, according to a study by a federal judge and a law school professor.

According to a 2010 poll, 61% of registered voters would choose an alternative to the death penalty for capital murder sentencing.

California (26%), Florida (14%), and Texas (9%) had nearly half (49%) of all death row prisoners in 2016. California has imposed a moratorium on executions.

Which States have the Death Penalty?

Many U.S. states practice capital punishment, although the trend is moving away from execution as a criminal punishment. As of 2021, twenty-four states still allow for the death penalty:

Want to Learn More About the Death Penalty? Talk to an Attorney

As you can see, the death penalty is still carried out in some states. Although it only applies in certain cases, it is an extreme reminder of the serious consequences of the criminal justice process. If you are facing criminal charges, it is in your best interests to contact an experienced criminal defense attorney to ensure that your rights are protected.

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As you can see by looking at available death penalty statistics, the number and manner in which prisoners have been executed has changed quite a bit and differs by state. Check out the most recent death penalty statistics and more at FindLaw's Criminal Procedure section.

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https://www.wfp.org/hunger-catastrophe#:~:text=The%20World%20Food%20Programme%20(WFP,is%20bigger%20than%20ever%20before.

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marching towards starvation

As up to 811 million people go to bed hungry every night, the number of those facing acute food insecurity has more than doubled - from 135 million to 276 million - since 2019. A total of 48.9 million people are facing emergency levels of hunger.

This seismic hunger crisis has been caused by a deadly combination of four factors.

Conflict is still the biggest driver of hunger, with 60 percent of the world's hungry living in areas afflicted by war and violence. Events unfolding in Ukraine are further proof of how conflict feeds hunger, forcing people out of their homes and wiping out their sources of income.

Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, undermine people's ability to feed themselves, and have displaced 30 million from their homes globally in 2020.

The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are driving hunger to unprecedented levels.

And, last but not least, the cost of reaching people in need is rising: the price WFP is paying for food is up 30 percent compared to 2019, an additional US$42 million a month.

From the Central American Dry Corridor and Haiti, through the Sahel, Central African Republic, South Sudan and then eastwards to the Horn of Africa, Syria, Yemen and all the way to Afghanistan, there is a ring of fire stretching around the world where conflict and climate shocks are driving millions of people to the brink of starvation.

While needs are sky-high, resources have hit rock bottom. The World Food Programme (WFP) requires US$21.5 billion to reach 147 million people in 2022. However, with the global economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap between needs and funding is bigger than ever before.

Unless the necessary resources are made available, lost lives and the reversal of hard-earned development gains will be the price to pay.

In countries like Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, WFP is already faced with hard decisions, including cutting rations to be able to reach more people. This is tantamount to taking from the hungry to feed the starving.

The consequences of not investing in resilience activities will reverberate across borders. If communities are not empowered to withstand the shocks and stresses they are exposed to, this could result in increased migration and possible destabilization and conflict. Recent history has shown us this: when WFP ran out of funds to feed Syrian refugees in 2015, they had no choice but to leave the camps and seek help elsewhere, causing one of the greatest refugee crises in recent European history.

In 2021, WFP made an appeal to the world's billionaires to step up. Ending hunger is the work of many and everyone can play a part.

Levels of humanitarian and development assistance must be stepped up to allow WFP to continue its life-saving work in emergencies but also to build the ability of families and communities to feed themselves and break their dependence on humanitarian support.

Evidence shows this approach pays dividends. In just three years to 2021, WFP and local communities turned 272,000 acres of barren fields in the Sahel region of five African countries into productive farmland, changing the lives of over 2.5 million people and contributing to peace and stability. In Bangladesh in 2020, WFP supported 145,000 people with cash assistance ahead of severe forecast flooding. This empowered them to buy food and medicine, protect critical assets and transport livestock and families to safe places, preventing losses and damages. This cut the emergency response cost by over half.

However, to achieve Zero Hunger, money is not enough. Only political will can end conflict in places like Yemen, Ethiopia and South Sudan, and without a firm political commitment to contain global warming as stipulated in the Paris Agreement, the main drivers of hunger will continue unabated.

In 2022, WFP is responding to unprecedented needs

Read more

ending hunger is everybody's business

With an operational footprint in over 120countries, WFP works alongside the hungry on the frontlines of starvation.

We deliver programmes that save lives with emergency food assistance and change lives with resilience programmes, and we are the partner of choice for national governments across the world. Our work in using food as a pathway to peace led to WFP being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.

WFP collaborates closely with other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations to provide an integrated package of support for the people we serve. We deliver logistical support as a common service to the entire humanitarian community, helping them to stay and deliver.

Guided by a vision that has people at its heart, WFP is harnessing the benefits of digital transformation in all its operations. From school meals programmes to emergency response, climate change mitigation to support for smallholder farmers, we are seeking out new approaches, tools and systems that enable us to do more in our work to end hunger.

Transparency and accountability at WFP

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A hunger catastrophe | World Food Programme

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As up to 811 million people go to bed hungry every night, the number of those facing acute food insecurity has more than doubled - from 135 million to 276 million - since 2019. A total of 48.9 million people are facing emergency levels of hunger.

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https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Crop_Progress_&_Condition/2021/index.php

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https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-still-have-slavery

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Slavery is a system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy, and sell other individuals as a form of property. Slaves are unable to withdraw from this arrangement and work with little to no pay.

Before 1865, the United States had 16 slave states. Slavery was abolished in 1865 following the Civil War. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Modern slavery, however, still exists around the world and continues to be a severe problem, mainly because modern slavery is not easy to recognize. According to the U.S. Department of State, modern slavery is used as an umbrella term for "the act of recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud or coercion." Modern slavery is often known as human trafficking.

Today, 167 countries still have slavery, affecting about 46 million people. Although governments have taken steps and raised awareness about modern slavery, it is difficult to detect and recognize in many cases. It's important to know the signs of slavery so that authorities and organizations can be alerted.

While over a hundred countries still have slavery, six countries have significantly high numbers:

India has the highest number of slaves in the world at 18.4 million slaves. This number is higher than the Netherlands' population and is approximately 1.4% of India's entire population. All forms of modern slavery exist in India, including forced child labor, forced marriage, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups.

China has the second-highest number of slaves at 3.4 million, which is less than a quarter of India's. Other countries with significantly high slave populations are Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan.

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Slavery is a system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy, and sell other individuals as a form of property. Slaves are unable to withdraw from this arrangement and work with little to no pay. Before 1865, the United States had 16 slave states.

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Containing the longest-running oil spill in U.S. history

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New Hampshire's population expanded by about 61,000 people between the 2010 and 2020 Census periods, which equates to a growth rate of just over four percent. While that's well below the average growth rate and New Hampshire's slowest rate since the 1920 Census, it's clear that by attracting thousands of new residents, the state remains an attractive place to live.

Whether they're relocating from another state or searching for a new community in New Hampshire, the good news for those investing in the state is that it's got one of the lowest rates of property crimes.

Violent crimes understandably get all of the press attention, but for the average person, property crime is a much more likely threat, so understanding how serious the risk level is in a given state is a good way of making sure it's worth your investment of time and money.
Want to learn more about our data? Click here.
At A Glance:

With #1 being the best, New Hampshire is ranked #2 for property crime out of 50 states + Washington, D.C.

You have a 1.21% chance of being a property crime victim in New Hampshire in the next 12 months.

New Hampshire's property crime rate is 43% lower than the average crime rate in the United States.

Newington has the highest property crime rate in New Hampshire (139.5 incidents per 1,000 people).

Newington is a small coastal town of about 1,700 people. In addition to having a small permanent population, which often leads to high population-adjusted crime rates, Newington is an attractive tourist spot thanks to its position on the Atlantic coast. Across the country, many of the towns and cities with the highest property crime rates are major tourist destinations, and the influx of people is believed to be a reason for high property crime rates.

Only one state (Massachusetts) has a lower crime rate than New Hampshire, and the Granite State is not far behind. Less than a tenth of a point separates the two states.

Like most other states, property crime has declined in New Hampshire over the past decade. Only Alaska and North Dakota saw property crime go up in that time, while New Hampshire's 46 percent drop was the third-largest, behind Massachusetts and Maine.

New Hampshire's Overall Property Crime Trends (2010 - 2019)

Average Rate of Property Crime:

New Hampshire 10-year average: 18.49 crimes per 1,000 people

National 10-year average: 25.61 crimes per 1,000 people

-46% Has property crime increased or decreased during this time?

There was a 46% decrease in property crime in New Hampshire from 2010 as compared to 2019.

2011 Which year had the highest rate of property crime in New Hampshire?:

The highest rate of property crime in New Hampshire was 2011 (24.9 crimes per 1,000 people)

2019 Which year had the lowest rate of property crime in New Hampshire?:

The lowest rate of property crime in New Hampshire was 2019 (12.1 crimes per 1,000 people)

What incidents fall under the umbrella of property crime? Burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson are the four major property crime categories reported by the FBI. In every case, if the incident involves violence or threats of violence, it no longer is a property crime and is classified as a violent crime.

What factors may be contributing to low property crime rates in New Hampshire? While crime is a complex issue, many researchers have linked high rates of poverty, unemployment, and urbanization to high property crime rates.

So, where does New Hampshire stand on those fronts? In all three cases, New Hampshire has considerably lower rates than the U.S. as a whole, which may lend credence to the notion that poverty, unemployment, and urbanization are tied to property crime.

Let's take a closer look:

Poverty: Just over seven percent of New Hampshire residents live below the poverty line, which is the lowest rate in the country. The national rate is about 12 percent.

Unemployment: New Hampshire's most recent unemployment rate of 2.8 percent is tied for the lowest and well below the national rate of about six percent.

Urbanization: About 81 percent of Americans live in urban areas, but in New Hampshire that rate is closer to 60 percent.

One reason why it's notoriously difficult to pinpoint all the reasons why one state has lower or higher crime rates than another is that crime is an intensely local issue. Even nearby communities can have vastly different crime rates.

This is particularly true in a geographically small state like New Hampshire. Newington, with the state's highest property crime rate (139.5 incidents per 1,000 people), is just 20 minutes from New Castle, with the state's fourth-lowest rate (1 per 1,000).

Top 5: Best Property Crime Rates (based on 2019 data)*:

Alstead, New Hampshire (Cheshire County)

Effingham, New Hampshire (Carroll County)

Bath, New Hampshire (Grafton County)

New Castle, New Hampshire (Rockingham County)

Madbury, New Hampshire (Strafford County)

Bottom 5: Worst Property Crime Rates (based on 2019 data):

Newington, New Hampshire (Rockingham County)

Tilton, New Hampshire (Belknap County)

Waterville Valley, New Hampshire (Grafton County)

Laconia, New Hampshire (Belknap County)

Rochester, New Hampshire (Strafford County)

* Excludes cities with zero property crime reported

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Safest Cities in New Hampshire - See Which Cities are in the Top 25

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New Hampshire's population expanded by about 61,000 people between the 2010 and 2020 Census periods, which equates to a growth rate of just over four percent. While that's well below the average growth rate and New Hampshire's slowest rate since the 1920 Census, it's clear that by attracting thousands of new residents, the state remains...

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In 2020, the most common type of violent crime committed in the United States was aggravated assault. Robbery was the next type of violent crime to take place most often, and although homicide rates have always been pretty high in America, they still only accounted for about five cases per 100,000 people.

Property crime is another category of crime in America, and the specific crimes that fall into this category are arson, burglaries, larceny, and motor vehicular theft and damage.

Collective Crime Rates in the United States in 2020

The average crime rates in America during the year 2020 were:

Homicide, 6.5 deaths per 100,000 people

Robbery, 73.9 cases per 100,000 people

Aggravated assault, 279.6 instances per 100,000 people

Burglary, 314.2 cases per 100,000 people

Larceny, 1,398 cases per 100,000 people

Motor vehicle theft, 245.9 cases for every 100,000 people

Crime rates decreased in the United States from 2016-2020. This is good news, but it also isn't that impressive when you look at the numbers. Take a look at the values below for crimes that involved guns and criminal activity that resulted in murder, if that wasn't the goal in the first place. These numbers are still quite large, and they are evidence of the reality that the United States still has a long way to go before crime becomes abnormal instead of the norm.

Crime rates vary significantly between states based on several factors, including population density and economic factors.

Historically, the causes and origins of crime have been investigated in many disciplines. Some of the factors known to affect the amount and type of crime that occur in each place are:

Population density and degree of urbanization

Differences in population composition, especially the concentration of young people

Population stability on resident mobility, travel patterns, and temporal factors

Traffic mode and road network

Economic conditions, including average income, poverty level, and ability to work

Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics

Family conditions in terms of divorce and family cohesion

Climate

After the FBI changed its criminal data collection program in 2021, nearly 40% of local law enforcement agencies did not report data to the federal government, while more than 7,700 agencies reported data at all. year for the FBI and nearly 4,000 agencies reporting partial data. The gap includes the nation's two largest cities by population, New York and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

States with the Lowest Violent Crime Rates

Maine has the lowest crime rate 108.58, and the incidence Count was 1466. Maine residents aren't as concerned about their overall safety compared to the rest of the nation. Maine had no mass shooting incidences, compared to one the year before. Property crime has dropped steadily since 2019 in Maine, and each of its safest cities experienced less property crime than the rest of the state, region, and the national average.

New Hampshire has the second-lowest crime rate in the United States with 2000 incidents. New Hampshire comes in well below US averages for violent crime and property crime. Its already-low violent crime rate made improvements this year.

The Green Mountain State borders Canada and is well regarded as one of the safest travel destinations in the US. Vermont has a crime rate of 173.4 per 100,000 people, making it the state with the third-lowest crime rate. According to Safewise, 78% of Vermonters feel safe in their state, beating the national average by a whopping 42%. The crime issue that causes the most concern is property crime, tied with package theft as the crime Vermonters fear may happen to them.

Connecticut has a crime rate of 181.59 per 100,000 people, that's the fourth lowest in America. The national average was 398.5, and Republican states like Texas, Arizona, and Tennessee had violent crime rates in the 400s and 600s - two to three times higher than Connecticut.

New Jersey New Jersey boasts some of the lowest crime rates in the country, New Jersey's crime rate of 195.36 is the fifth-lowest nationwide. This is the second consecutive year that New Jersey was among the states with the lowest violent crime rates in the nation. The Garden State is the fourth-lowest in the nation when it comes to property crime. In the Mid-Atlantic region, New Jersey bested the violent-crime regional average, with the lowest rate ahead of New York (363.8)

States with the Highest Violent Crime Rates

District of Columbia

The District of Columbia has the highest crime rate in the United States, with a 999.8 crime rate per 100,000 people. According to me Metropolitan Police Department, homicides increase by 14% compared to 2021, robbery by 24%, burglary by 8%, and 4% in motor vehicle theft.

Alaska has the second-highest crime rate of 837.85 per 100,000 residents. Alaska has the highest violent crime rate and the thirteenth-highest property crime rate in the US. Alaska's violent crime rate is more than double that of the Pacific region and is the highest of all 50 states. So Alaskans' low concern about violent crime is out of sync with the amount of violent crime happening.

New Mexico has the third-highest crime rate in the United States. New Mexico continues to have higher-than-average crime rates across the board, but the good news is that property and violent crime rates are declining yearly. Violent crime fell to 778.28 per 100,000-but that still gives New Mexico the third-highest violent crime rate in the US.

Tennessee

Tennessee's crime rate of 672.70 per 100,000 is the fourth-highest in the country. According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) increase in property, crimes were driven by the number of reported burglaries in Memphis and Shelby County. Memphis saw an increase of 23 percent while the county as a whole saw an increase of nearly 12 percent. The number of reported motor vehicle thefts (carjackings) in Memphis increased by nearly 13 percent and 11 percent in Shelby County.

Arkansas's crime rate of 671.93 per 100,000 is the fifth-highest in the country. According to the CDC at the National Center for Health Statistics, Arkansas has one of the highest death rates from firearms. Crime rates in the state are driven up by high concentrations of violence in some cities. Both the Pine Bluff and Little Rock metropolitan areas' violent crime rates -- at 1,098 and 939 incidents for every 100,000 residents, respectively -- are far higher than the national average.

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Crime Rate by State [Updated August 2022]

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https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/

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In 2021, the violent crime rate in the United States was 395.7 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners.

Reported violent crime rate in the United States

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S. inhabitants. In the timeline above, rates are shown starting in 1990. The rate of reported violent crime has fallen since a high of 758.20 reported crimes in 1991 to a low of 361.6 reported violent crimes in 2014.

In 2020, there were roughly 1.3 million violent crimes committed in the United States. This number can be compared to the total number of property crimes, roughly 6.45 million that year. Of violent crimes in 2020, there were 921,505 aggravated assaults, making this offense the most common of violent crime offenses.

Law enforcement officers and crime clearance

Though the violent crime rate was down in 2013, the number of law enforcement officers also fell. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of law enforcement officers in the United States rose from around 673,100 to 708,600. However, since 2009, the number of officers fell to a low of 626,900 officers in 2013. The number of law enforcement officers has since grown, reaching 696,644 in 2020.

In 2020, the crime clearance rate was highest for murders and non-negligent homicides, with around 54.4 percent of murders being solved by investigators and a suspect being charged with the crime. Roughly 46.4 percent of aggravated assaults were cleared in that year. A dossier of statistics on violent crime in the U.S. can be found here.

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Reported violent crime rate in the U.S. 2021 | Statista

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In 2021, the violent crime rate in the United States was 395.7 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S.

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Editorial Lead, Safety & Security

The SafeWise Team is pleased to release the eighth annual Safest Cities report.

Here are the 10 Safest Cities in New Hampshire for 2022

See if your city made the full list.

In New Hampshire , 42% of residents are concerned for their safety daily, which isn't far from the national average of 47%. Despite this near-average level of concern, people in New Hampshire reported fewer personal experiences with crimes than in previous years.

The Granite State has some of the lowest crime rates in the country-rates that continue to decline. Unsurprisingly, its safest cities come in well below the state average for violent crime and property crime.

2022 New Hampshire crime rates

New Hampshire comes in well below US averages for violent crime and property crime. Its already-low violent crime rate made improvements this year, dropping from 1.6 incidents per 1,000 people to 1.5. Likewise, the property crime rate decreased from 12.2 to 11.0.

New Hampshire's violent crime rate is the second-lowest in the country (behind Maine), and its property crime rate claims the same rank (with only Massachusetts beating it). Both of these states are its regional New England neighbors-the region with the lowest crime rates in the country.

Level of concern and experience with crime in New Hampshire

Compared with last year, a greater number of New Hampshirites expressed daily worry over their personal safety. Still, State of Safety survey respondents reported fewer personal experiences with crime and violence in the past 12 months.

Most notably, none of the participants reported experiencing violent crimes, making New Hampshire the only state in the nation to do so. Experiences with property crime and gun violence dropped by over half and two-thirds respectively when compared to our previous survey's results.

Image: SafeWise. Past 12 months=12 months prior to survey.

Crime concerns in New Hampshire

We asked New Hampshire residents which crimes they worry may happen to them. See if New Hampshire residents are concerned about the same crime issues as the rest of the country.

Violent crime in New Hampshire: Fear vs. reality

Four out of five residents in New Hampshire feel safe in their home state. This is likely a result of the state's low violent crime rate and zero self-reported experiences with violent crime in the last year. But rape appears to account for a higher percentage of violent crimes than most states.

80% of people in New Hampshire reported feeling safe in their state compared to 55% of Americans-only Wyoming residents (86%) reported higher levels.

No Granite Staters reported having a personal experience with violent crime in the last 12 months-down from 5% last year.

New Hampshire ranks number 2 in the list of lowest violent crime rates in the country and is one of just 15 states to see a drop in the violent crime rate year over year.

Murder is the least common violent crime in The Granite State, making up 1% of violent crimes.

Rape makes up 27% of violent crimes in New Hampshire, only being surpassed by Maine for the highest percentage of reported rapes in the country.

33% of survey participants report using some form of personal protection like pepper spray -about the same as the US average (34%).

29% of residents in New Hampshire say their personal safety has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic compared to 44% of Americans-only 3 states reported lower numbers.

Attitudes about gun violence in New Hampshire

51% of New Hampshire residents cited gun violence as a top safety concern-just under the US average of 53%.

28% are most worried about a gun violence incident happening to them (US 38%). Gun violence is residents' lowest concern compared to property crime, package theft, and general violent crime.

3% of survey respondents reported experiencing gun violence in the 12 months prior to the survey, a threefold decrease from 9% last year.

There was 1 mass shooting New Hampshire in 2021 while there were none in the 2 previous years.

Property crime in New Hampshire: Fear vs. reality

New Hampshire residents reported fewer experiences with property crime than the previous year. This aligns with the state's decreasing property crime rate. Residents were also less likely than any other state to say that the COVID-19 affected the security of their personal property.

Less than half as many New Hampshirites (9%) reported personal experiences with property crime year over year (20%).

Burglary accounts for 9% of all property crimes in The Granite State.

14% of participants reported experiencing package theft in the last 12 months, putting New Hampshire well below the US average of 20%. It's the second lowest in the country behind Arkansas (12%).

57% of residents in New Hampshire use some form of property protection. This is close to the 60% national average.

The top form of property protection in New Hampshire this reporting year was guard animals with 37% of survey respondents using them.

Just 13% of Granite Staters say the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the security of their property-this is the lowest (tied with Wyoming) in the US, which averages 29%.

A closer look at the safest cities in New Hampshire

For the purposes of this report, the terms "dangerous" and "safest" refer explicitly to crime rates as calculated from FBI crime data-no other characterization of any community is implied or intended.

Danville dropped from our number 1 last year to this year's number 10.

Atkinson went up two spots to take the crown as the number 1 city this year.

Every safest city reported violent crime incidents in the single digits, and 6 reported 0 incidents.

Every safest city reported 0.5 or fewer violent crimes per 1,000 residents-except for Danville, which landed at 0.7.

Burglaries were slashed in half among the safest cities year over year.

All safest cities reported fewer than 5.5 property crimes per 1,000 residents.

No safest city reported more than 52 total property crimes.

How we determined the safest cities

Learn how we identified the safest cities on our methodology page.

How to make a safe home anywhere

Whether your city made our list or not, we encourage everyone to be proactive about home security. One of the best ways to stop a burglary before it happens is to add a home security system.

Find security and safety resources in your area

Didn't find your city in the top 20?

We calculated crime rates for every city in the state that met our population threshold, based on the state's median population as calculated using FBI data. To request a report of the remaining cities in your state, sign up for our email newsletter (we make it easy in a quick form below!) or email info@safewise.com with the subject line: Safest Cities Full Report.

NOTE: If you don't see your city on the list, it means that it was below the population threshold or didn't submit a complete crime report to the FBI in 2020.

Find the safest cities in each state

Click on the state image or dropdown menu below to check out the safest cities for each state.

Related articles on SafeWise

FBI: Crime Data Explorer, Accessed March 8, 2022.

US Census Bureau, " Data Explorer," Accessed January 24, 2022.

Best Places, " Find a Place Search Tool," Accessed January 24, 2022.

SafeWise, " 2021 State of Safety survey," Accessed March 8, 2022.

Gun Violence Archive, " Past Summary Ledgers," Accessed January 24, 2022.

Gun Violence Archive, " General Methodology," Accessed March 8, 2022.

Melody Hicks, Ben Stickle, Joshua Harms, American Journal of Criminal Justice, " Assessing the Fear of Package Theft," January 04, 2021. Accessed March 8, 2022.
For definitions and more on data sources, see our methodology page.

Alina is a safety and security expert that has contributed her insights to CNET, CBS, Digital Trends, MTV, Top Ten Reviews, and many others. Her goal is to make safety and security gadgets less mystifying one article at a time. In the early 2000s, Alina worked as a volunteer firefighter, earning her first responder certification and paving the way to her current career. Her activities aren't nearly as dangerous today. Her hobbies include fixing up her 100-year-old house, doing artsy stuff, and going to the lake with her family.

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New Hampshire's 20 Safest Cities of 2022 | SafeWise

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Editorial Lead, Safety & Security The SafeWise Team is pleased to release the eighth annual Safest Cities report. Here are the 10 Safest Cities in New Hampshire for 2022 See if your city made the full list. In New Hampshire , 42% of residents are concerned for their safety daily, which isn't far from the national average of 47%.

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https://www.itopf.org/news-events/news/tanker-spill-statistics-2021/

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Data from ITOPF shows that six oil spills over 7 tonnes were recorded from tanker incidents in 2021. This is a slight increase on 2020, but on a par with the average for the 2010s and a dramatic reduction from the numbers reported in earlier decades, see attached graph below.

Only one of the six incidents in 2021 resulted in a spill greater than 700 tonnes (classified as a 'large' spill). This occurred in Asia in April and involved heavy crude oil.

The other five incidents (classified as 'medium' spills) involved crude, slurry and non-persistent oils.

The total volume of oil lost to the environment from tanker spills in 2021 was approximately 10,000 tonnes, the majority of which was spilt in the one large incident. This figure is higher than the previous two years but remains a fraction of the 1.7 billion tonnes[1] of oil that is transported by sea each year.

Despite some annual fluctuations, the number and volume of oil spills from tankers has plummeted since ITOPF's records began half a century ago and is largely stabilising at a low level. This reduction has been driven by positive change from the shipping industry, supported by governments, and their ongoing commitment to exploring and investing in ways to improve maritime safety and environmental protection.

It is important to note that although ITOPF attends incidents from all types of ship, for historical reasons our annual statistics publication reports incidents involving tankers only. Accidents involving non-tank vessels which carry oil as bunker fuel, such as container ships, bulk carriers and general cargo ships, may also be a source of pollution. Other non-shipping sources, such as pipeline spills and oil industry activities, as well as natural seepage, also contribute towards the global input of oil into the marine environment.

For further information, please visit our Statistics page. The full report will be available on our website shortly.

[1] This figure is for crude oil only and does not include petroleum products. Source: Review of Maritime Transport 2021 | UNCTAD

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Data from ITOPF shows that six oil spills over 7 tonnes were recorded from tanker incidents in 2021. This is a slight increase on 2020, but on a par with the average for the 2010s and a dramatic reduction from the numbers reported in earlier decades, see attached graph below.

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https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism

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February 17, 2022

Seth Jones, senior vice president; Harold Brown Chair; director, International Security Program; and director; Transnational Threats Project, testifies before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on the topic of "The Rise in Violence Against Minority Institutions.”

Chairwoman Jackson Lee, Ranking Member Biggs, and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee on “The Rise in Violence Against Minority Institutions.” The threat from domestic terrorism in the United States is serious and continues to evolve, including the threat to minority populations. As this testimony highlights, objective analysis and better data are particularly important to gauge the nature of the threat and effective responses.

The rest of this testimony is divided into three sections. The first outlines the contours of domestic terrorism and highlights the data set compiled by analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The second section focuses on trends in domestic terrorist incidents and fatalities. The third provides implications for Congress.¹

I. Domestic Terrorism

Terrorism includes the deliberate use—or threat—of violence by non-state actors to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact.² Violence and the threat of violence are important components of terrorism. This definition is largely consistent with the official U.S. government definition of domestic terrorism under 18 U.S. Code § 2331 as “acts dangerous to human life” that occur primarily within U.S. territory and are intended “(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”³

In focusing on terrorism, the data used in this testimony does not focus on the broader categories of hate speech or hate crimes. There is some overlap between terrorism and hate crimes, since some hate crimes include the use or threat of violence. But hate crimes can also include non-violent incidents, such as graffiti and verbal abuse. Hate crimes and hate speech are obviously concerning and a threat to society, but the data concentrates on terrorism and the use—or threat—of violence to achieve political objectives.

This testimony leverages a CSIS data set, which includes 1,040 cases of terrorist plots and attacks in the United States between January 1, 1994, and December 31, 2021. The data set is divided into such categories as the incident date, perpetrator, location, motivation, number of individuals wounded or killed, target, and weapons used. We have cooperated with—and provided the data to—such organizations as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and National Counterterrorism Center.

II. Trends in Incidents and Fatalities

The years 2020 and 2021 had the highest numbers of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in our data set. In 2021, there were 73 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. As shown in Figure 1, the number of fatalities increased from 5 in 2020 to 30 in 2021. This level was roughly comparable to 2019, in which there were 35 fatalities from terrorism in the United States.

Figure 1: U.S. Terrorist Attacks, Plots, and Fatalities, 1994–2021

Source: Data compiled by the CSIS Transnational Threats Project.

The recent increase in domestic terrorist activity began around 2014. From 2014 to 2021, there have been an average of 31 fatalities per year—indicating that the 30 deaths in 2021 were typical of this period. This is substantially more than the period from 1994 to 2013, during which there were only three years in which more than eight individuals were killed in terrorist attacks in the United States.⁴

The return to a higher level of fatalities in 2021 may indicate that the lower number of deaths in 2020 was an anomaly. This may have been the result of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown policies disrupting routines and reducing mass gatherings, the absence of mass casualty events—including due to effective prevention efforts—or perpetrators’ prioritization of less lethal methods to send a political message, particularly in the context of public demonstrations and the 2020 presidential election.

Terrorist attacks and plots in 2021 spanned 18 states and Washington, DC. While many of these events took place in large metropolitan areas, these cities were dispersed across the continental United States. The highest concentration of incidents occurred in and around Portland, Oregon, where CSIS tracked 18 terrorist attacks and plots in 2021. The next highest number of terrorist incidents occurred in New York City, where there were seven attacks and plots in 2021.

The types of weapons used and the targets selected in terrorist attacks in 2021 may provide insight into perpetrators’ intentions and the threat of lethal terrorist activity. White supremacists and other like-minded attackers used more lethal weapons, such as firearms. Anarchists, anti-fascists, and other like-minded attackers primarily used less lethal methods, including melee attacks. Regardless of perpetrator ideology, most terrorist fatalities in 2021 were from firearms: 9 of the 11 fatal attacks were committed with firearms, accounting for 26 of the 30 deaths.⁵

Of the 38 white supremacist and other like-minded terrorist attacks and plots in 2021, 16 used firearms, 9 involved explosives and incendiaries, 4 were melee attacks using weapons such as knives or bludgeoning weapons, and 2 were vehicular attacks. For example, on March 16, Robert Aaron Long conducted a shooting spree at three spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area, killing eight individuals and injuring one. Long viewed the women working at these spas as a “temptation” and aimed to help other men suffering from “sex addiction” by killing them.⁶

Of the 31 anarchist, antifascist, and like-minded terrorist attacks and plots in 2021, 19 were melee attacks using weapons such as knives or bludgeoning objects, 3 primarily used explosives or incendiaries, 2 used firearms, and 1 was a vehicular attack. The large number of melee attacks was a diversion from the traditional reliance on explosives and incendiaries by anarchist, antifascist, and like-minded individuals.⁷ Most of these melee attacks involved deliberate property damage, and some also included incendiaries as a secondary weapon.

Government, military, and police locations and personnel were the most frequently targeted by domestic terrorist attacks regardless of perpetrator orientation. Of the total 77 terrorist attacks and plots in 2021, 29 were directed against government, military, and police targets. These perpetrators identified with a range of ideologies and movements, including the QAnon conspiracy, the sovereign citizen movement, militia groups, anarchism, anti-fascism, environmentalism, and other anti-government and anti-authority philosophies. The next most common target for violent anarchist, antifascist, and like-minded perpetrators was businesses.

In addition, white supremacists and other like-minded extremists have targeted individuals because of their racial, ethnic, religious, or political makeup—such as African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and Jews. In 2022, for example, Malik Faisal Akram targeted a suburban Fort Worth, Texas synagogue. In 2018, Robert Bowers murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Patrick Crusius murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019.

III. Implications for Congress

Congress has an important role to play in several respects.

First, the U.S. government does not publicly release comprehensive data on terrorist attacks and plots, the characteristics of perpetrators, and other factors like tactics and targets. Data analysis could offer an objective mechanism for apportioning counterterrorism resources and efforts relative to actual threats. The FBI (or more broadly the Department of Justice) and Department of Homeland Security should issue annual or biannual reports to the House and Senate Judiciary, Homeland Security, and Intelligence Committees that assess the domestic terrorism threat; analyze domestic terrorism incidents that occurred in the previous six months or one year; and provide transparency through a public quantitative analysis of domestic terrorism-related assessments, investigations, incidents, arrests, indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and weapons recoveries.

Second, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies need additional help—including resources—to identify and respond to domestic terrorism “left of boom.” The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and FBI should continue to review their respective counterterrorism training and resource programs that are provided to federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies and ensure that such programs include sufficient training and resources in understanding, detecting, deterring, and investigating acts of domestic terrorism. Congress should also consider encouraging the Department of Homeland Security to increase funds for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which provides funding for nonprofit organizations—including houses of worship—to improve and upgrade their security.

Third, the U.S. government, its partners overseas, and the private sector need to continue to aggressively target individuals and groups that espouse violence on digital platforms. This is a war of ideas on virtual battlefields—just as much as on the streets of U.S. cities and towns. Virtually all domestic extremists use the internet and social media platforms to release propaganda, coordinate training, raise funds, recruit members, and communicate with others. Congress should continue to demand that these digital platforms take down content that supports domestic terrorism and violates their terms of service.

Terrorism, like crime, will not end. But better data collection and analysis—along with effective countermeasures—can significantly reduce the threat from domestic extremists.

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Senior Vice President; Harold Brown Chair; and Director, International Security Program

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Seth Jones, senior vice president; Harold Brown Chair; director, International Security Program; and director; Transnational Threats Project, testifies before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on the topic of “The Rise in Violence Against Minority Institutio…

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https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgh/enrollment-rates-by-country

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Intentional homicides are estimates of unlawful homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not in…

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U.S. Should Create National Strategy by End of 2022 to Reduce Its Increasing Contribution to Global Ocean Plastic Waste, Says New Report

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The United States should create a national strategy by end of 2022 to reduce its outsized and increasing contribution to plastic waste in the world’s oceans.

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https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.aspx

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​​​2020 Aviation Safety Statistics (Source: NTSB)​

11/17/2021

​​WASHINGTON (Nov. 17, 2021) - U.S. civil aviation fatalities decreased last year amid broad reductions in flight activity, according to 2020 statistics published by the National Transportation Safety Board.

After two consecutive years with airline passenger fatalities, there were no fatal accidents involving Part 121 air carriers in 2020. In seven of the last 10 years, there have been no airline passenger fatalities.

Most aviation deaths in 2020 took place during general aviation operations, where 332 were killed, compared to 414 the year before. The 2020 fatal accident rate in general aviation was 1.049 accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared to 2019's rate of 1.064.

Accidents in On-Demand Part 135 operations, which encompass charters, air taxis, air tours and medical services (when a patient is on board), claimed 21 lives in 2020, down from 32 in 2019.

​Compared to 2019, flight activity in 2020 decreased across all segments of U.S. civil aviation:

U.S. air carrier operations decreased by 55 percent, from about 19.8 to 8.9 million flight hours

Part 135 commuter operations decreased by 46 percent, from about 417,000 to 225,000 flight hours

Part 135 on-demand operations decreased by 19 percent, from about 3.8 to 3.0 million flight hours

General aviation operations decreased by 11 percent, from about 21.8 to 19.5 million flight hours

The 2020 statistics include investigations that are still ongoing, so they do not detail potential reasons for the accidents and fatalities in U.S. aviation. The NTSB also publishes an Annual Summary of U.S. Civil Aviation Accidents that includes additional information from completed investigations. The NTSB will release its 2019 Annual Summary in December, and it continues to address civil aviation safety in all operations, including highlighting safety issues on its Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements.

The 2020 statistics are available at https://go.usa.gov/xe9Xx​

To report an incident/accident or if you are a public safety agency, please call 1-844-373-9922 or 202-314-6290 to speak to a Watch Officer at the NTSB Response Operations Center (ROC) in Washington, DC (24/7).

To report an incident/accident or if you are a public safety agency, please call 1-844-373-9922 or 202-314-6290 to speak to a Watch Officer at the NTSB Response Operations Center (ROC) in Washington, DC (24/7).

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U.S. Civil Aviation Fatalities and Flight Activity Decreased in 2020

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​​​2020 Aviation Safety Statistics (Source: NTSB)​

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https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-terrorism-index-2022

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Despite global terrorist attacks increasing to 5,226 in 2021, deaths declined slightly by 1.2%.

The Ukraine conflict is likely to drive a rise in traditional and cyber terrorism, reversing previous improvements in the region.

Terrorism in the West declined substantially, with attacks falling by 68%. The US recorded its lowest score since 2012.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 48% of global terrorism deaths.

The Sahel is home to the world's fastest growing and most-deadly terrorist groups.

Myanmar had the largest rise in terrorism with deaths increasing 20 times to 521 deaths in 2021.

Islamic State (IS) replaces the Taliban as the world's deadliest terror group in 2021, with 15 deaths per attack in Niger.

Terrorism has become more concentrated, with 119 countries recording no deaths, the best result since 2007.

In the West, politically motivated attacks overtook religious attacks, which declined by 82%. There were five times more political attacks than religious attacks.

Terrorists are using more advanced technologies including drones, GPS systems and encrypted messaging services.

LONDON, 2 March 2022: The 2022 Global Terrorism Index (GTI) reveals that despite an increase in attacks, the impact of terrorism continues to decline. In 2021, deaths from terrorism fell by 1.2% to 7,142, while attacks rose by 17%, highlighting that terrorism is becoming less lethal. Two thirds of countries recorded no attacks or deaths from terrorism - the best result since 2007 - while 86 countries recorded an improvement on their GTI score. The number of deaths has remained approximately the same for the last four years.

The Index highlights that terrorism remains a serious threat, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for 48% of total global deaths from terrorism. Four of the ten countries with the largest increases in deaths from terrorism were also in sub-Saharan Africa: Niger, Mali, the DRC and Burkina Faso.

Following military defeats in Syria and Iraq, IS shifted its attention to the Sahel, with deaths from terrorism rising ten times in the region since 2007. The Sahel has become the new epicentre of terrorism. Terrorism in the region is compounded by high population growth, lack of adequate water and food, climate change and weak governments. Adding to the complexity, many criminal organisations are representing themselves as Islamic insurgencies.

The annual Global Terrorism Index, now in its ninth year, is developed by leading international think tank the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) and provides the most comprehensive resource on global terrorism trends. The GTI uses a number of factors to calculate its score, including the number of incidences, fatalities, injuries and hostages, and combines it with conflict and socio-economic data to provide a holistic picture of terrorism.

The Index shows that terrorism is becoming increasingly concentrated, contracting into countries already suffering from violent conflict. Conflict zones accounted for 97% of all deaths. The ten countries most affected by terrorism are all in conflict zones. Only 44 countries recorded a death from terrorism in 2021, compared to 55 countries in 2015.

The largest increase in terrorism was in Myanmar, where deaths rose 23 times from 24 to 521, followed by Niger, where deaths doubled, increasing from 257 in 2020 to 588 in 2021. Mozambique had the largest drop in terrorism deaths, falling by 82% to 93. The success was largely driven by counter-insurgency operations against IS by Mozambican forces, with support from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community.

Also on a positive note, counter insurgency has significantly decreased Boko Haram's activities, with the organisation recording only 64 attacks in 2021. Deaths dropped by 92% from 2,131 in 2015 to 178 in 2021. The decline of Boko Haram contributed to Nigeria recording the second largest reduction in deaths from terrorism in 2021, with the number falling by 47% to 448.

Ukraine is likely to see an uplift in terrorism. In the 2014 crisis, the country recorded 69 terrorist attacks. Of serious concern are the knock-on effects of cyber terrorism to other countries. In addition to cyberattacks on the Ukraine, Russia has been credited with attacks on many other countries. It is possible that the threat of cyber terrorism will rise globally alongside the escalation of the Ukraine conflict.

The Ukraine conflict is likely to reverse gains in Russia and Eurasia, which recorded the largest improvement on the GTI in 2021, followed by North America. The MENA region has improved substantially, moving up two places from the least peaceful region in 2018. For the second year in a row, South Asia is the region most impacted by terrorism, while Central America and the Caribbean region recorded the lowest impact.

Steve Killelea, Founder & Executive Chairman, IEP: "Terrorism is becoming more centred in conflict zones, underpinned by weak governments and political instability, while in Europe and the US politically motivated terrorism has overtaken religiously motivated attacks. As conflict in the Ukraine dominates global attention it is crucial that the global fight against terrorism is not sidelined. Terrorist activity in the Sahel is increasing substantially, and is driven by Islamic militias."
"The decline of terrorism in the West coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions on freedom of movement, travel and the immediate threat to personal health may explain some of the fall. Once the emergency measures are removed there is the possibility of an uptick in terrorism activity."
As technology has advanced so has its use by terrorist groups. This includes missiles and drones, which extend the reach of their attacks and reduce their casualties. Affordable smartphones, social media and encryption are other technologies that also extend their networks, making the spread of propaganda and recruitment easier.

The report identifies IS and its affiliates as the world's deadliest terrorist group in 2021, despite deaths attributed to the group declining slightly from 2,100, to 2,066 deaths. The worst attack of 2021 occurred when an IS suicide bomber detonated two bombs at Afghanistan's Kabul International Airport, resulting in 170 deaths and more than 200 injuries.

Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen, who operate in the Sahel, is the world's fastest growing terrorist organisation and was responsible for 351 deaths in 2021, a 69% increase. The world's most lethal terrorist group was the Islamic State of West Africa, where in Niger each attack averaged 15 deaths.

Attacks in the West have declined significantly, dropping by 68% in 2021, from the peak in 2018. In total there were 113 attacks in Europe in 2021, and seven attacks in the US. The US recorded a significant improvement in the impact of terrorism, recording its lowest GTI score since 2012. There were three attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe, the lowest amount since 2014.

Over the last three years in the West there has been a significant shift in the instigators of terrorism. Acts of religious terrorism declined by 82% in 2021, and have been overtaken by politically motivated terrorism, which now accounts for five times as many attacks. Most attacks which are driven by a left or right ideology are perpetrated by individuals or groups with no formal affiliation to a recognised organisation. The targets of these attacks are often similar, typically government organisations or political figures, and the motivations are similar. Both cohorts are radicalised online and hold the existing system in contempt.

Attacks in the UK halved in 2021 to 12, the lowest number since 2008, with only one being religiously motivated. The US recorded seven attacks, with five being politically motivated and the remaining two unclassified. France recorded seven attacks down by 72% from the 25 recorded in 2020.

The conditions most closely associated with terrorism vary depending on the social and economic factors of a country. There is a clear link with political terror and a lack of acceptance of basic human rights for the majority of countries. For OECD countries, there is a strong relationship between increased terrorism and social inequalities, as well as easier access to weapons and higher militarisation. For other countries, weak institutions, group grievances and political terror are significant factors in driving terrorism.
ENDS Notes to Editors
The full GTI 2022 report and interactive map are available at: visionofhumanity.org

Follow: @GlobPeaceIndex

Like: facebook.com/globalpeaceindex
Contacts:
Global Terrorism Index press office at H+K Strategies: gti2021@hkstrategies.com
Global Terrorism Index (GTI)
The GTI by the Institute for Economics & Peace provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism over the last 14 years. The report ranks 163 countries (99.7 per cent of the world's population) according to the impact of terrorism. The indicators include the number of terrorist incidents, fatalities, injuries and hostages.

The GTI report is produced using data from Terrorism Tracker and other sources. Terrorism Tracker provides event records on terrorist attacks since 1 January 2007. The dataset contains over 60,500 terrorist incidents for the period 2007 to 2021
Institute for Economics & Peace
The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) is the world's leading think tank dedicated to developing metrics to analyse peace and to quantify its economic value. It does this by developing global and national indices, including the annual Global Peace Index, calculating the economic cost of violence and understanding Positive Peace which is the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.

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Despite global terrorist attacks increasing to 5,226 in 2021, deaths declined slightly by 1.2%. The Ukraine conflict is likely to drive a rise in traditional and cyber terrorism, reversing previous improvements in the region. Terrorism in the West declined substantially, with attacks falling by 68%. The US recorded its lowest score since 2012.