It’s easy to believe that life on Earth is getting ever worse. The media constantly highlight one catastrophe after another and make terrifying predictions. With a torrent of doom and gloom about climate change and the environment, it’s understandable why many people – especially the young – genuinely believe the world is about to end. The fact is that while problems remain, the world is, in fact, getting better. We just rarely hear it.

We are incessantly told about disasters, whether the latest heat wave, flood, wildfire or storm. Yet the data overwhelmingly shows that over the last century, people have become much safer from all these weather events.

Indeed, in the 1920s, half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade, the death toll averaged 18,000. This year, just like 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.

Weather-fixated television news would make us all think that disasters are getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, 4.5 percent of the land area of the world would burn every year. Over the last century, this declined to 3.2 p%. In the previous two decades, satellites have shown further decline – in 2021, just 2.5% burned. This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning by the end of the century.

And despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters (mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines), damage costs are declining, not increasing, as a percent of GDP.