Population-health layers combine Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Burden of Disease 2023 results, long-run life expectancy compiled by Our World in Data from Riley, the Human Mortality Database, and UN World Population Prospects, and World Bank WDI demographic series.
| Metric | Displayed measure | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Total population | De facto mid-year population | 1960-2025, loaded countries |
| All-cause mortality | Age-standardized deaths per 100,000 population | 1980-2023, loaded locations |
| Life expectancy | Period life expectancy at birth | 1543-2023 where source observations exist; broad country coverage is recent |
| Total fertility | Live births per woman | 1980-2023, loaded locations |
| Crude birth rate | Annual live births per 1,000 population | 1960-2024, loaded countries |
Two birth measures
Total fertility and crude birth rate are not interchangeable. Total fertility estimates births per woman across reproductive ages. Crude birth rate divides annual live births by the entire mid-year population. The interface keeps their controls, units, colors, and normalization separate.
Reading health with conflict
The world explorer can draw an IHME health choropleth beneath conflict events while retaining the selected conflict window. The Life and Death scene compares candidate-observation density, total population, mortality, fertility, and crude birth rate using separate stacks. It does not sum potentially overlapping candidate casualty estimates.
Global metric rail
Four block-letter rows are placed inside the 3D scene north of the map. The rail eases through a 90-degree rotation toward the map and finishes as an upright stack on the same vertical axis as the data columns. It contains only metric names and numeric values. Disabling a metric removes its row and slides the rows above it down; re-enabling a metric adds its row to the top. Population uses the World Bank's exact WLD aggregate for the selected year; conflict counts visible UCDP candidate observations. Mortality and fertility are rates and cannot be meaningfully totaled, so their numbers report the arithmetic mean of displayed country observations.
Measure-year playback
The foreground playback dock and the primary measure-year slider share one state transition. Playback advances one year at a time across the 1960–2025 source window, updates every year-dependent display, and stops at the final year. The rate control changes cadence rather than interpolating observations between source years.
Reading health with government forms
When a regime category is selected, matching country-year locations are outlined over the health field. The related-data panel reports descriptive group means and transitions supported by overlapping V-Dem and IHME years. Unequal coverage, confounding, lag, and measurement differences remain visible limitations.