15 Un-Fun Facts About the World in 2021

There’s a lot of things happening in the world at the moment. And we’re right in the thick of it. It’s hard to look past these but it’s good to know what’s going on in the world. These are the things we see and hear about that make us want to do better and help in any way we can. Here are 15 of the most unfun facts about the world right now in 2021.

1 – A global situation we’re all feeling

COVID all right, let’s get the elephant out of the room. COVID is affecting a lot of people, in many different ways. The ripple effect of the virus is endless.

Just to highlight one statistic here, unemployment rates remain historically high in the USA. It differs from city to city, but take Atlantic city Hammonton, New Jersey, for example, where the unemployment rate is 35%.

According to USA today with many sightings, they’re too old to find a new job or switch careers. There is a recession that’s skyrocketing prices on goods and services, mental health problems, amplified poverty, death of loved ones.

Tourism is non-existent overcrowded healthcare facilities with no relief for staff and a mistrust between friends and with the government. There is plenty more, but you get the gist it.

2 – Worldwide extreme poverty

As if extreme poverty wasn’t already a problem before COVID. Can you imagine how bad it’s still going to get? It’s near impossible to gauge the exact repercussions of the virus until it’s over.

The world bank speculates that a further 150 million people will experience extreme poverty. In 2021, since 1990, a billion people have left their extreme poverty behind. So, there’s always hope.

Education, healthcare and food are still all needed to ensure people can get out of poverty and until governments and politicians truly act on behalf of the people, this problem will sadly continue.

3 – People a struggling to get food

Money won’t solve world hunger. A lot of people go hungry because of the greed of those in power corrupt. Governments are part of the socio-economic problem that fuels malnutrition in developing countries.

2 billion people go hungry every day. That’s a fact it’s worse than Africa. We’re more than half the population go hungry every day. 45% of children that die before they turn five years old is because they don’t get proper nutrition fact.

There are communities and individuals who are doing everything in their power to overcome this tragedy. They’re looking at innovative ways to feed people, including climate-resistant crops methods, to combat drought and sharing these ideas with community members.

4 – Health issues that may be able to be fixed

Forbes reports that two people have died from COVID every minute so far in 2021. How does that relate to other health issues around the world?

Currently, one child dies every 20 seconds from a preventable disease due to a lack of vaccines, 7,000 people lose their fight against HIV, TB and malaria daily.

The effect of a woman’s monthly period causes young girls to stay home from school because they don’t have access to sanitary products. These absent days heavily affects their education and in turn their entire life, but are they enough to eradicate these frightening statistics? Especially now after attention has been shifted away and is solely focused on COVID.

5 – Education is still not available to everyone

We said earlier, something as common as a monthly period can negatively affect school girls and impoverished communities from attending school because they don’t have access to sanitary products.

You can see how poverty, health, and education are all linked together. Do something.org, shared some awful facts about education, 11.07 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa leave before completing primary school. And it rises to 13.5, 4 million and South and West Asia.

Children from rural communities are twice as likely to not be in school than urban children. Women that don’t have full access to education are having more children at an average of 2.5 over their lifetime, compared to educated women who were having an average of 1.7 children. And because women and children take the fall for being the most uneducated, they’re also the ones more exposed to our next un-fun fact.

6 – Violence towards your gender

GBV takes many shapes and forms. Genital mutilation, human trafficking, child, marriage rape, domestic violence. Homicide. Here are some stats.

5,000 honor deaths happen every year.
35% of women worldwide are subject to domestic violence.
-One in three women have experienced sexual assault.
-10 million children have been victims of child sexual exploitation.
-And 38% of murdered women have been killed by their partners.

Statistics like the above are tragic and don’t just happen to women. We know that if you know or suspect that someone is being hurt, please report it. You never know. You could just be saving someone life,

7 – Equality is still an issue

Unfun fact is that over 2.7 billion women do not have the same choice of jobs as men do. The census Bureau from 2018, confirmed that women of all races earned 82 cents for every dollar a man of all races earned.

The equal pay act was passed in 1963. At this time, women working full-time were earning roughly 59 cents on every dollar a man was earning. And then on top of it still doing the housework child-rearing and cooking.

It’s taken decades for the pay gap to reach 82 cents per $1 that men were earning, which is an increase of less than a penny a year like Malala use of PSI. Once said, “I raise up my voice. Not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard, we cannot all succeed. When half of us are held back.”

8 – The plastic problem isn’t getting better

Another un-fun reality is the massive problem we are having with plastic bags. The Worldwatch Institute States that 100 billion plastic bags are used each year by the US alone and a mere 0.6% of them have recycled the rest land up well, everywhere.

These packets kill millions of birds and mammals a year to make 100 billion bags. You need 12 million barrels of oil. One home will use roughly 1500 plastic bags a year. The bags are used for an average of 12 minutes and then take around 500 years to degrade.

Once they get to a landfill, sadly, they don’t break down completely, but rather photodegrade. The packet becomes microplastic and that continues to pollute the environment, which brings us to.

9 – We’re polluting the world

We put plastic packets in a standalone because it’s one piece of pollution we are all guilty of and can all avoid by just bringing reusable shopping bags, pollution as a whole is another category that is most definitely unfun.

There are so many different types of pollution, air pollution, both indoor and outdoor water pollution, soil pollution, light pollution, noise, pollution, thermal, or heat pollution, radioactive pollution.

Americans make up an estimated 5% of the world’s population. However, the US uses 25% of the world’s resources burning up nearly 25% of the coal 26% of the oil and 27% of the world’s natural gas.

We can no longer ignore the longterm effects of pollution. It permeates our lives in every way imaginable. And it’s up to us to do everything we can to reduce, reuse and recycle.

10 – Mother nature is hitting back

Are you aware that since COVID hit more than 100 natural disasters have occurred affecting more than 50 million people around the world.

Geneva based International Federation of red cross and red Crescent societies released a report with their findings confirming that while everyone’s attention was on COVID communities have experienced catastrophic natural disasters.

The report was titled world disasters report 2020 come heat or high water. And it showed that over the last 10 years, climate and weather-related disasters have affected 1.7 billion people.

The report does add that although global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions does not directly cause hurricanes or droughts. It is magnifying the risks and frequency of such events.

11 – Look up at the trees man

Deforestation is the removal of standing forests. Usually, with devastating consequences, this removal could be intentional or natural. And currently, it’s happening extensively in the Amazon rainforest.

There are many factors behind deforestation, but farming is the main cause with 80% of forests destroyed for cattle ranching and logging deforestation means a loss of natural habitat for animals and plants.

The trees also provide shade for many animals and plants and regulate the temperature. When those trees are gone, there are major changes to the temperature, which kills wildlife. Another effect of deforestation is soil erosion.

Soil erosion is the displacement of the upper layer of soil and trees help the land to retain that topsoil and water. When the topsoil, the pleats farmers move on to the next patch of land and it becomes a perpetual cycle.

12 – Terrorism is in many places

There are many examples from so many countries, but we’ll just use the most recent spectacle that took place at the white house Trump supporter or a Biden supporter. It doesn’t matter.

The behavior demonstrated on that day was an act of domestic terrorism. Full-stop Trump rioters store on the steps of the White House. When the perimeter was breached and proceeded to break into the building, this kind of madness and mayhem has not been seen inside the Capitol.

And over 200 years, several people died during this demonstration, clashes and riots occur all around the world. Mostly there for good causes. Like when hundreds protested in Sheila demanding access to pensions or the clashes in Jakarta over Indonesia’s new labor law, politifact.com reported.

There were 2,974 terrorist attacks in the United States between January, 1970 and March 2019 and described all of these attacks as domestic terrorism. But when it’s executed, like it was at the white house, we’d have to say that’s really unfun.

13 – There is a heck of a lot of debt around

Have you got any idea of what countries owe in debt $69 trillion in total? And guess what? The USA owes the lion’s share of the cash. The US government owes $21 trillion in government debt, developing countries, despite not having as extreme a debt as the US are unable to repay loans, putting them at an even greater disadvantage.

This unpayable debt, if used to physically help, the people has been recommended to be written off by the Jubilee debt campaign. However, if loans were taken for odious reasons and the lender was aware, then the lender needs to scrap that debt as they’re responsible for their actions.

For example, South Africa loaned $22 billion to fuel the apartheid regime. They’re still trying to recover from this as reported in the daily Maverick on the 31st of August, 2020, an article by ed Stoddard and Tim Cohen, the budget deficit for the 2020 21 financial year is seen to be exceeding 760 billion Rand or 15.7% of gross domestic product.

This compares to the 370.5 billion Rand or 6.8% of the GDP forecast and the February 2020 budget. A more than doubling of a number that was already very worrying and relaxers. That’s just one country of many sitting with debt that they can opera pet.

Some people still decide to look at race in a negative way

This is a global issue. It exists in every country around the world. It’s an embedded belief that a different race is inferior to your own. It’s driven by prejudice, discrimination, ego, and power.

Many claim they’re not racist, but then carry out subtle racial gestures like choosing not to sit next to a person of color on a bus, clutching a purse tighter under an arm when a person of color walks past or watching a person of color suspiciously when they’re doing their shopping.

And that’s just the covert racism. There’s also direct racism and systemic racism. And honestly, it’s not only on a fund, but a real job situation do something.org provides some hard truths regarding racism on average black men in the US receive sentences that are 19.1% longer than those of white men convicted of the same crimes in New York city.

88% of police stops in 2018 involved black and Latino people while 10% involved white people and of those stops, 70% of them were completely innocent and we could go on, but we won’t as Maya Angelou put it “prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”

15 – There’s corruption everywhre

Transparency international is a non-governmental organization in Germany that releases a corruption perceptions index, where it looks at the misuse of power for individual benefit.

Here are the 10 countries they put forward as the most corrupt: Columbia. Yeah, Mexico, Ghana, Myanmar, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Kenya, Bolivia, and Russia.

Transparency International was also mentioned in a Forbes article written in 2019 and was quoted as saying most countries are failing to control corruption in a meaningful way. And that is contributing to a crisis in governance.

Antonio Gutierrez, the UN secretary-general said that corruption costs around 2.6 trillion a year, and that businesses and individuals fork out roughly $1 trillion in bribes annually.

Can you imagine how different things would be if money was going, where it was supposed to go? So what do you believe to be one of the biggest challenges facing our world today? We would love to hear from you in the comments.

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Thanks for reading this quite, erm, depressing article of 15 not very fun facts about the world in 2021. As we mentioned, it’s good to highlight these things so we can change our behavior and be more aware of how we can impact other peoples lives.