14 reports in this theme, newest first.
High-income countries, with 17% of the world's people, generate 57% of Claude.ai usage and the five low-income countries with published data 0.2%; income alone explains 80% of usage per capita and English adds nothing, while 1.2 billion people live where doctors are fewest and digital foundations weakest, so the accelerator is not yet pointed at the need.
Countries vulnerable in 2000 have closed their human-development gap at about 0.3% a year, a half-life of two centuries. Those that avoided reversals closed it three times faster, while reversals erased 13% of their gains. Higher human development makes reversals shallower and polycrisis risk lower (r = −0.84). Faster convergence with halved reversals would bring 38 of 60 vulnerable countries past an HDI of 0.70 by 2050, against 17 at the recent pace.
About 11.6 million people a year die in six channels that polycrisis prevention targets. Matching the best quarter of income peers would protect 4.6 million of them and reaching the next income tier 7.0 million, but doing both would protect 8.6 million. The burdens cluster in the same 55 countries and share drivers such as health coverage and sanitation, and closing the gaps by 2040 would protect about 172 million lives by 2050.
Each 0.1 rise in the Human Development Index goes with about 63% fewer people hit by climate disasters, 62% fewer near-poor and 25% less death from communicable disease. Within countries over time, the share affected by climate disasters falls 40% per 0.1. Yet human development gains in 2019–2023 were half those of the 2000s, the gap between low- and very-high-HDI countries has stopped closing, and development has not damped growth volatility or pandemic mortality. Those tail risks need their own institutions.
Half the world's school-age children — 962 million in 35 countries — live where most 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text and climate hazard is high. Children's exposure to dangerous heat doubles by mid-century, with sub-Saharan Africa's share tripling to a quarter, yet only one in five primary schools in low-income countries has electricity to run a fan. Because schooling is among the strongest predictors of how well people cope with disasters, every lost school day today weakens tomorrow's resilience.
In 35 countries with 1.45 billion people, from Nigeria to Bangladesh, fine-particle pollution is stuck high or still rising while income stays below $10,000 a head — and growth has not cleaned the air of the poorest third of countries at all. The loop runs both ways: poverty means smoky fuels and weak regulation, and pollution costs 3.7 years of life expectancy in lower-middle-income countries and erodes human capital. China turned the corner at $14,000 a head and India at about $7,000 — proof that clean air can come early, as growth policy rather than its reward.
Humanity's centre of gravity is drifting 1,700 km towards the hot belt from West Africa to South Asia just as that belt crosses danger-level heat. By the 2090s, 2.2 billion people live with a month or more of it in a middle-of-the-road world and 5.0 billion in a fragmented, high-emission one — nearly half of them people not yet born in places not yet dangerous. Low emissions and education-led development each cut that exposure by half or more, and because half of it sits on 0.5% of inhabited land, protection can be targeted.
Disasters kill far fewer people than they did — 6 per million a year in the 2010s against 99 in the 1960s — because capacity rose faster than threat. Within countries, each extra year of adult schooling has cut deaths per 1,000 people affected by about a third. Projected to 2100, that capacity keeps winning in most futures, but not in a fragmented, high-warming SSP3 world, where population and hazard outpace schooling and expected deaths rise in two-thirds of countries.
Humanity will live about 739 billion person-years between 2025 and 2100. On current trends, 180 billion of them will be spent under at least two of three hazards: polluted air, a hot climate and a high-risk country. Counting exposure cumulatively shows that clean air and resilience with peace each avoid more of those years this century than the gap between warming pathways, though mitigation decides how many people end up near the edge of the human climate niche.
From 2000 to 2024, about 174 million children died before their fifth birthday, more than ten times the 14.9 million excess deaths of the pandemic's first two years. Today 69% of those child deaths fall in the high-risk countries that hold a quarter of humanity. Matching the best quarter of each income group would avert 2.4 million child deaths a year, nearly half the total, and 34 million more by 2050 than on current trends.
Even if no hazard worsened, the share of humanity living in today's high-risk countries would rise from a quarter to 43% by 2100, because population is growing fastest where risk is highest. About half of the 9.5 billion babies due between now and 2100 will be born in those countries. Combining UN population projections with the INFORM risk map shows who is exposed, where and in which generation, and how far reducing risk could offset demography.
Africa's share of humanity is returning to its seventeenth-century level and then far exceeding it, from 13.5 per cent in 2000 to a projected 37.5 per cent by 2100. Five centuries of African demography, from 1500 to scenarios for 2500, alongside the diaspora and the mixed ancestry that spreads African heritage worldwide far faster than migration does.
With the 2030 Agenda two-thirds spent, 36 per cent of assessable SDG targets are on track or moving moderately and 15 per cent have gone into reverse. The pattern beneath those numbers is not random, and it says a good deal about where the remaining effort should go.
Half of developing economies have not narrowed the income gap since 2019. The pathways now proposed in manufacturing's place — digital services, agro-processing, green industry, minerals — are tradable and productive, and they absorb a fraction of the labour. That splits convergence into measures that used to move together.