Humanity facing uncertain times and an extremely turbulent life
10:29
The pandemic, war, and climate change are setting us back in our development, making us live shorter lives, learn less, earn less, and are uncertain about tomorrow. The authors of the UN Human Development Report are sounding the alarm: people around the world are living worse today.
"We live in a world full of worries. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, although it has already set back almost every country in the world in social development, continues to shower us with more variants in unpredictable ways. The war in Ukraine and elsewhere is causing more and more suffering. Record temperatures, fires, storms, and floods are an alarm to our planet," they begin their new report
For more than thirty years, they have been ranking countries based on the Human Development Index (HDI), which measures the development and living standards of the population. It includes factors such as life expectancy, per capita national income, education, political situation, and poverty levels. After looking at the situation in individual countries, experts rank them into groups that determine their level of development in a given year.
This time, they sound an alarm: for the first time since it was compiled, the HDI in most of the world's countries has fallen for two years in a row, which means that globally people are getting worse off. Although it had previously been growing steadily for decades, it began a marked downward slide in 2020, due to a pandemic, and continued to fall a year later, retreating to 2016 levels and turning the growth that had been achieved over the past years on its head.
