Why this page exists
We ask a lot of these numbers. We want you to feel them, and perhaps even let them change something about how you live. A number that asks that much has to be one you can trust, and this page explains where ours come from.
Where the numbers come from
We don’t produce data of our own. The figures on this site come from organisations that measure the world for a living: UN agencies such as FAO and WHO, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, science agencies such as NASA and NOAA, and researchers publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
On every page we have researched, the sources are listed at the bottom and numbered in the text, so you can see which source backs which claim and go and read it yourself.
When sources disagree
They often do. Two agencies may measure the same thing in different ways, or one may simply be more recent. We apply the same rules on every page:
- Official and intergovernmental sources come first, then peer-reviewed research and research groups that publish their methods.
- Among sources of the same standing, the most recent figure wins.
- If they are close, we average them and give the spread.
- If they are far apart, we pick one, say why, and show both figures on the page.
We use journalism, or a report that doesn’t publish its method, only when nothing better exists, and when we do, the page says so. When the evidence comes as a range, the counter uses the middle of it and the page shows the full range.
How a counter moves
A counter starts from the most recent measured figure and runs forward at a rate taken from a published projection or, where there is none, from the recent trend. The last measured value is anywhere from a few months to two years old, so the number you see ticking is an estimate of where things stand today.
Carbon dioxide in the air is a good example. Our counter reads 428.894672 parts per million as you read this. It starts from NOAA’s January 2026 reading of 426.84 ppm. Everything after that is a projection toward the 603 ppm that the IPCC’s intermediate scenario reaches in 2100, the scenario closest to where today’s policies lead. Each researched page has a short note headed “How this number was made” that spells this out: which part is measurement and which part is extrapolation.
Read a counter as a fair picture of scale and direction. It is not a precise reading of this exact second.
Pages we haven’t reached yet
Many of our pages were written years ago, under looser rules than these, and we are redoing them one at a time. If a counter page lists no sources, we haven’t reached it yet, and its number deserves more caution than the rest.
How often we check
We aim to re-check every researched page at least once a year, and sooner when a major dataset it relies on is updated.
How we work
We use AI tools extensively to help us research and draft new counters as well as updating our existing material. Every figure is checked against the source it cites, and nothing is published until approved.
Found a mistake?
Tell us at yes@theworldcounts.com. Include a link to the page and, if you have one, the source you think we should be using. When we get something wrong, we fix it.
