Apologies, our data visualisation didn’t make it into the first version. You’re reading the correct version.
Readers in New England, this one’s for you. Our friends at Granite Goodness, who do for the region what we try to do for the planet, are hosting a meetup for our subscribers on Thursday 12 November, 5:30pm to 8pm, at Portico Brewing in Somerville, just outside Boston. There’s no agenda, no panel, and no slides. It’s basically a lot of good beer and a room full of people who are interested in talking about what’s going right, and don’t say things like ‘Yeah, but the world’s a dumpster fire.’ It’s during Boston Human Week, so if you’re in town, swing by.
The headlines say global poverty is rising. That was the message last week from the UNDP, whose 2026 Multidimensional Poverty Index counted an additional 51.5 million people living in poverty compared to the previous report. It’s the first increase since the index launched in 2010, a result that the UNDP’s administrator, Alexander De Croo, called “a wake-up call for the world.”
When you open the data tables, though, the picture gets a little more complicated. This year’s update includes new surveys for only 13 countries. For the rest, researchers assumed the same rate as the previous report and applied updated population figures, which added 15.8 million people. Nobody in those countries was actually measured as worse off; the UNDP just swapped new population figures into column J of the spreadsheet.
Among the 13 countries that do have new data, there was one clear reversal. In 2013, 42% of Nigerians were counted as multidimensionally poor. In 2021, that had fallen to 33%, but by 2024, it was back up to almost 39%, which meant 17.9 million more people in poverty in three years. No amount of statistical housekeeping explains that one away. The other big change came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the poverty rate barely moved, but population growth added another 10 million.
Everywhere else, the news was… pretty good? Egypt, Nepal and Tajikistan cut both their poverty rates and their number of poor people. Angola and Zambia brought their rates down, though population growth pushed their totals up. The rest saw no significant change, but that bit didn’t make it into the press release (in their defence, UN agencies don’t often raise money with “mixed results, mostly good”).
The long-run record is even better. Of the 89 countries with comparable data over time, 76 have recorded a significant fall in poverty in at least one period, and 54 have seen a fall in every period observed. Thirty-three have halved poverty in less than 15 years, including the world’s two most populous countries (China and India), as well as six countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Across those 89 countries the number of people counted as poor has fallen from 1.55 billion in their first surveys to 1.04 billion in their latest.
The bigger problem is geriatric data. Only 38 countries have conducted surveys since the pandemic. Seventeen countries, home to 155 million poor people, still rely on surveys from 2016 or earlier; Sudan’s last one was in 2014. We are, in other words, making assumptions about global poverty in 2026 partially based on surveys carried out when the Ice Bucket Challenge was the biggest thing on the internet.
What we can say with certainty is that poverty is increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which is now home to more than half of the world’s poor. Nigeria and the DRC alone hold more than 150 million of those people. The question now is whether those countries, whose populations are growing fastest, can start shrinking their circles too. Based on historical precedent (famous last words) we think there’s a good chance they will. We’ll just have to wait for the data to catch up.
👇 With a very large tip of the hat to the irreplaceable Hans Rosling. We’ve put all the data (plus an interactive version of the chart) over here.
Kenya has signed a $160 million deal to protect 173,000 km² of wilderness, roughly the size of Uruguay. Donors, including heirs to the Walton and Cargill fortunes, put up about half; the government will match it over ten years, with payments tied to policy changes. The first focus is Tsavo, home to 40% of Kenya’s elephants and a fifth of its black rhinos, and the Maasai Mara corridor to the Serengeti.
Paraguay’s lower house just voted to ban child marriage. The bill now goes to the Senate. If enacted, Paraguay would become the 14th Latin American country to ban child marriage outright since 2015, leaving just six countries in the region still allowing it. La Nación
**Since 2020, Azerbaijan has cleared nearly 3,000 km² of landmines, and repatriated almost 40,000 displaced people. **In numbers: 260,147 mines destroyed across Karabakh and East Zangezur, following the end of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. De-miners used trained rats to help with removal; these animals are smart enough, and light enough, to detect the mines without setting them off. President of Azerbaijan / APA
Cubans who emigrate will no longer have their homes confiscated. A new housing law, in force from 21 October, replaces the 1988 statute under which the state seized the property of anyone leaving permanently. Citizens may now own two homes, sales and donations are formalised before a notary, and housing cooperatives and real-estate firms are recognised as builders and managers. Directorio Cubano / Periódico Cubano
India is capping the trade margins on 137 cancer drugs. From early November, trade margins on the listed medicines will be limited to 30% of retail price, and the government expects shelf prices to fall by up to 70%. Oh, and manufacturers are obliged keep supply at current levels, so no easy outs there. ThePrint
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at its lowest since satellite records began in 1988. We shared the preliminary figures in an earlier edition; the official numbers are now in. Forest loss between August 2025 and July 2026 was down 41.8% on the year and more than 1,000 km² under the previous record low in 2012. Deforestation in the Cerrado fell too, to the lowest since records began in 2001. “It’s an absolutely stratospheric drop,” said environment minister João Paulo Capobianco. Bloomberg
Earlier this year we spoke to Eric Nguyen from Radical Numerics, a company interested in using AI models to both spot dangerous pathogens and design new biology from scratch. Now Radical Numerics has announced that they’ve used an AI-designed phage (a virus that attacks bacteria) to treat a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. If true, this will be the first time an AI-designed virus of any kind has been used to treat a patient — we say “if true” because the claim rests entirely on the company’s own report. Radical Numerics won’t say who the patient or doctors are, citing confidentiality, so there’s no way to independently check, and it’s too early to know whether the phage actually cleared the infection.
Treating deadly bacterial infections with phages has technically been done since 1919, when the microbiologist Félix d’Hérelle first used phages to treat dysentery patients in Paris, with interest in the technique paralleling the rise of drug-resistant bacteria. However, since any given phage only kills a few strains of bacteria, and finding which phages kill which bacteria is a slog, it’s never been that popular. Radical Numerics hopes to change that by using AI to custom-design phages that can treat particularly nasty drug-resistant bacterial strains. This was their first test. Looks very, very promising. NYT
London’s super sewer has reduced the amount of raw sewage going into the Thames by 86%. The The 25 km Tideway tunnel, begun in 2016 and fully connected in 2025, let through just under three million cubic metres of storm overflow in 2025, against a pre-tunnel average of more than 21 million, and the share of days with an elevated health risk fell from 76% to 10%. Thames Water
North Sea oil and gas emissions have fallen for six years in a row. Production emissions dropped 7% in 2025 and are 37% below 2018, with more than half of last year’s cut coming from fixes on working platforms rather than fields shutting down. Flaring and methane are both down 60%, and the regulator says halving emissions by 2030 is now within reach. NSTA
America’s rooftops now generate five times more solar power than a decade ago. Small-scale systems produced 92,979 GWh in 2025, up from 18,812 GWh in 2015. Growth has however, slowed since 2022. EIA
**Wholesale summer power prices have nearly halved in Texas and California since 2021. **From June through August 2026, solar and storage saved Texans approximately $3.55 billion and Californians approximately $2.5 billion compared with the same period in 2021. SEIA
New England’s wind farms have already made more electricity this year than in all of 2025. Generation through September was 4,619 GWh, after the region’s wind capacity grew 47% to 2.5 GW. EIA
The Strait of Hormuz runs both ways. A record 2.6 GW of solar panels were exported from China to Saudi Arabia last month. 𝕏Dave Jones
**Canada just protected a big chunk of boreal forest and peatland. **The Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Taiga Forests and Peatlands project in northern Ontario has placed 814 km² of boreal forest and peatlands beyond the reach of logging. It’s one of the largest private conservation deals in the province’s history, an area bigger than Singapore, with soils that hold nearly twice as much carbon as tropical forest.
We’ll soon have spacecraft orbiting Mercury, and this was hard to do, and you should read on to find out why. In October 2018, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched a spacecraft called BepiColombo. The goal? Get the vehicle into orbit around Mercury. This is way harder than you’d imagine. Heading towards the Sun is all downhill: a spacecraft falling inward speeds up the whole way, and would reach Mercury far too fast for the little planet’s gravity to catch it. Braking with thrusters alone would take so much fuel the spacecraft would be too heavy to launch. So instead it sheds speed by swinging past different planets in our Solar System and handing a bit of its energy to each one, a trick worked out by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, after whom the mission is named.
Nine flybys later (one of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury), BepiColombo is nearly there, and about to split in two so both halves can observe Mercury at once. Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter will focus on the planet itself, mapping its terrain and the minerals in its crust, while Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter studies its thin atmosphere and its weak magnetic field. Space.com / ESA
And finally, in honour of BepiColombo getting itself around Mercury, we’re ending with another 2018 throwback, courtesy of New Scientist. You’re welcome.
