📊 EV’s Charts of the Week #88

Demographic change, earthquakes, DeFi, decarbonising aviation++

Hi,

Chantal here. Azeem is still away, so we have a shorter version of COTW today!

As you may have seen, we are hiring a junior operations associate. If you have someone you’d like to recommend, email marija@exponentialview.co.

Thanks for reading, and please share the edition with your friends.

DEPT OF DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

Neo-neo-Malthusianism

The world’s two most crowded countries stand out by their extreme predicted change in population.

Source: The Economist

However, Chinese official data is reliably unreliable. Last June, a data breach showed that its demographic crisis could be much worse than previously thought — a serious threat to its stability. In short, China’s population is ageing, and its workforce is shrinking. We covered this briefly in recent issues, see EV#384 and EV#383.

Source: Yi Fuxian 

On shaky ground

The UN estimates that 5 African countries will be amongst the 10 most populated in the world by 2100: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Egypt. An unexpected silver lining is that population growth will increasingly take place in places with fewer earthquakes.

Source: Global Earthquake Model

(Very) hot spots

On the flip side, many of the growing regions are likely to experience significant disruption from climate change, from falling crop yields to flooding. In the chart below, NASA predicts that by 2070, areas showing in red will see significant decreases in corn yields. The effects of climate change impact on fertility rates and migration are yet to be understood. 

Source: NASA

WEDNESDAY POLL

Over ⅔ of value stolen from the DeFi ecosystem in the past year stemmed from exploiting cross-chain bridges that connect different blockchain ecosystems and help information and tokens move from one to another.

Source: Messari