By Chris Houston
Let’s review.
2024 was an especially violent year. It was also the hottest on record. While most countries exist in high states of peace, we live in times of rising conflict and a climate crisis. We also live in times of optimism and hope. Let’s explore recent trends and apparent contradictions in the complex world that we all share.
“Is it getting better? Or do you feel the same?” Bono asks in the U2 song One. It can be difficult to make sense of the world. Professor Max Roser, who runs the website Our World In Data and said “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better…It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other.”
2024 was the hottest year on record and was the first year to average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial average. The last 10 years have been the hottest 10 on record. Fires in Los Angeles have displaced 180,000 people and destroyed or damaged some 12,000 structures. News makes it easier to understand the impact on humans than the wider ecology and annoyingly centers the stories of impact on celebrities more than regular people.
In some ways the world is getting safer. The Institute for Economics and Peace note that the impact of terrorism and homicides reduced in 2024. The organization notes that “There are currently 56 active conflicts, the most since the end of [the] Second World War.” Truly apparently contradictory: globally the world is getting less peaceful and that “North America recorded the largest regional deterioration in peacefulness, with both Canada and the US recording large falls in peacefulness.” The organization attributes the deterioration to “increases in violent crime and perceptions of criminality.”
Further, they say, “the conflict in Gaza has had a very strong impact on global peacefulness.” A January 2025 study in The Lancet journal published last week suggested that the “Palestinian MoH under-reported mortality by 41%” and estimated “64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury” between October 7 2023 and June 30 2024. The total death toll in wars includes not just deaths from violence, but from diseases too. Israel’s destruction of Palestinian healthcare facilities is deadly.
154,626 people were killed in wars in 2023. 2024 data isn’t compiled yet. We currently live in some of the highest fatality rates from war since the Rwandan genocide. Homicides typically kill even more people than war, ending the lives of 415,000 people a year. Suicides kill 760,000 annually.
The biggest killers of people are diseases. 74 percent of annual deaths are from non-communicable diseases. 14 percent die from infectious diseases. About 1.3 million people die in transportation accidents. Public conversations and media reporting tend to disproportionately focus on the violent deaths and road safety more than deaths from disease.
In addition to the human cost, violence had a devastating financial cost. Violence costs the world $19.1 trillion a year. That’s 13.5 percent of global economic activity. It is more than the total spending on health, it is more than the GDP of China. Imagine what we could invest in if the costs of violence did not consume so much. Economists tend to be united in pointing out that prevention work is massively less costly than emergency response. I wonder, if we took a rational approach to peace promotion, how much we should spend on teaching people about peaceful ways to resolve disagreements, both locally and internationally.
2024 was the most deadly year for humanitarian workers. 325 humanitarian workers were killed in 2024, 96 percent of them local staff, and most killings occurred in Gaza.
Humanitarian needs are rising. The United Nations identified 307 million people in need of aid in 2025. So far, their appeal for funding was 1.2 percent met–woefully inadequate. UNICEF identifies Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Haiti as locations with the greatest level of emergencies, they also note major Mpox and Polio outbreaks.
While humanitarian needs are generally trending upwards, for the past three years funding to help people affected by climate, conflict and other crises has reduced. The world continues to spend more than double on ice cream than it does on helping those affected by crises. I wonder about our priorities.
Despite all of this, many things are getting better. People are living longer. Global life expectancy dipped at the start of COVID, but is now rising again. Infant mortality continues to reduce, the rate of infants dying before reaching the age of five has halved since 2000. Thanks to advances in medical science and access to healthcare, fewer women are dying in childbirth. The global literacy rate for men and women continues to climb. More people are getting access to electricity, the internet and jobs.
We live in times that, in some ways, feel self-contradictory, but it’s not so much oxymoronic as it is endlessly, frighteningly, wonderfully complex.
Chris Houston, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the President of the Canadian Peace Museum non-profit organization.
