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Graphic Truth
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been engulfed in violent gang warfare and without a leader since its former prime minister, Ariel Henry, was barred reentry to the country on March 12. Henry formally resigned on Thursday, and a new transitional government was sworn in.
The chaos has triggered a major wave of internal displacement, putting its border with the Dominican Republic, in a state of crisis. The Dominican Republic has doubled down on border security in response, but relations between the two countries, which share the island of Hispaniola, have long been complex.
Haiti was once the richest colony in the world. But under French rule, the island suffered from severe deforestation, leading to soil erosion, reduced agricultural productivity, and increased vulnerability to natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. When the Dominican Republic gained independence from Haiti in 1844, it introduced reforestation programs that – along with its mountain ranges – have helped it develop a more sustainable agricultural sector. But Haiti's drier land and less fertile soil have made agriculture more challenging.
While the economies of the two countries were comparable in the mid-20th century, the Dominican economy gradually improved over the subsequent decades, while Haiti, long plagued by political instability, has seen its economy deteriorate.
It’s World Book Day! We’re big readers here at GZERO, and we suspect you might be as well. Alas, literature just doesn’t have the caché it once did, but in some ways we are living in a golden age of literacy. At no point ever in human history have so many people been able to read and write.
Some 87% of all people above age 15 were able to read as of 2022, up from 67% as recently as 1979. That’s a big bump, but wind the clock back a bit more to see just how far we’ve come. In 1820, the World Economic Forum estimates that just 12% of the world’s adults could read and write.
Have a look at recent progress in our chart, and don’t forget to crack open that book you’ve been meaning to get to today!
Happy Earth Day! Activism on behalf of the Big Blue Marble is heating up — but, sadly, so is the planet itself.
Earth — so hot right now. The Earth’s surface temperature is rising thanks to human activities like burning fossil fuels, which adds heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In other words, global warming, a central aspect of climate change, is getting worse.
Last year was the hottest on record, and the 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade. Earth also just saw its hottest March on record, and it was the 10th month in a row to set a global heat record.
We’re already experiencing the rippling consequences of climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme weather events and rising sea levels.
Are governments doing enough to address these problems? Is climate change one of your biggest concerns? Share your thoughts with us
Saturday marks 25 years since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The attack in which two students used high-powered rifles to murder 12 of their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves was the largest school shooting in US history at the time.
It was also the first to be covered extensively in real-time by cable news, and it set off a national debate about gun violence, as well as the impact of bullying, video games, and prescription drugs on teen mental health.
A quarter of a century later, those debates continue — what’s different is that the frequency of school shootings has surged, increasing nearly sevenfold over the past decade alone.
Although deaths from these kinds of attacks account for only about 1% of total firearm fatalities, their rise tracks a broader increase in gun homicides and suicides that began during the pandemic in 2020.
Here is a look at the rise of school shootings in America beginning in the early 1990s.
As the weather warms, the US and Canada are bracing for the potential of another record-breaking wildfire season. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive on record, with more than 6,000 fires tearing through tens of millions of acres and blanketing the US East Coast and Midwest in smoke.
Meanwhile, the US saw the smallest number of acres burned in more than two decades last year, thanks tohigh levels of precipitation and snowfall, which kept the West mostly out of trouble. But it also experienced its deadliest wildfire in over a century in Maui, Hawaii.
Canada's federal officials are warning that this season could be even worse. Warm fall and winter conditions, combined with droughts and next to no snowfall from December to February in essential areas like southern British Columbia and the Prairies impact soil moisture levels, raising the risk of fires.Despite lofty rhetoric about equality from politicians in Washington and Ottawa, the US and Canada are trailing behind several of their G7 counterparts (though both far ahead of Japan) when it comes to progress made in narrowing the gender pay gap over the past two decades or so, OECD data shows.
Women working full-time in the US make 84 cents for every dollar men make, according to the Census Bureau. Canadian women make 88 cents for every dollar men make, per the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Since 2002, the gender wage gap — defined as the difference between median earnings of men and women relative to median earnings of men — has declined in the US from 22.1% to 17%. During the same period in Canada, it declined from 24% to 17.1%.
Are the US and Canada doing enough to narrow the gender pay gap?
From devastating hurricanes and ceaseless wildfires to catastrophic floods, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost in Canada and the US. As climate change makes disasters more frequent and destructive, insurers are having to raise rates and reduce coverage.
In the US, the home insurance industry has had three straight years of underwriting losses. Insurance rates rose an average of 21% in 2023 as a response, with some insurers in disaster-prone places like California and Florida ceasing to write new policies altogether. As a result, homeowners are forced to pay higher premiums for the fewer insurance options that remain.
In Canada, last summer’s record wildfires compounded with historic floods, costing more than $3.1 billion in insured damage and spiking rates in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
For this week’s Graphic Truth, we looked at how much insurance rates have risen around the US and Canada.
Latest
Graphic Truth: One island, two realities
Graphic Truth: World literacy reaches new heights
Graphic Truth: The rise of US school shootings
Graphic Truth: Canada braces for wildfire season
Graphic Truth: Home insurance costs are on the rise
