What Happened in Every Second of 2025

I think we can all agree that 2025 was an eventful year. Every day brought us closer to 2026, and despite being constantly bombarded with information, it is impossible to be aware of absolutely everything. In many ways, every second counted.

Here is what happened in those seconds

4 babies were born every second, that's roughly 363,000 a day and 134 million in 2025. On the other side, around 2 people died per second, meaning 173,000 died per day and 64million per year.

That's roughly twice as many people being born than dying in 2025.

Climate change has definitely had a tough year.

1,207 tonnes of CO2 were released every second. That's rouhgly 38.1 BILLION tonnes per year. There is clearly much to be done.

The world also used 126.8million litres of fresh water every second, which accounts to roughly 4,000km³ per year.

AI data centres used between 10,000 and 24,000 litres every second for cooling, which accounts to anywhere between 312 and 765 billion litres per year. This is meant to only increase the more the world becomes dependant on AI software.

The world produced 317 tonnes of food every second. This accounts fo roughly 10billion tonnes per year.

Of that, we wasted 41tonnes of edible food per second. We're getting better at food wastage, however, this still accounts to around 1.3billion tonnes of food waste per year.

That food waste could have provided 15,000 meals every second.

Food waste also means a waste of money. We spend roughly $665,450 on food per second. This is roughly $21 TRILLION per year.

What hurts more is that we only need around 11,600 meals every second to end acute hunger worldwide. We wasted more food than what it would take top fix one of humanities worst problems.

2025 was definitely the year of energy.

The world consumed 19 terajoules (19 trillion joules) every second. This is a huge amount of power.

Of that, we used around 15 terajoules of energy from coal, oil and gas. This is approximately 80% of all energy used. Clearly much to be done.

Nature didn't have an easy year either.

we lost 0.13 hectares (130m²) every second. This means we lost 11,200 hectares per day, or around 4.1million hectares in 2025 alone.

On top of that, around 4.1 tonnes of plastic pollution was created every second.

This is around 130million tonnes of plastic in 2025. That number should not be that big.

Our reliance on the Internet did not drop, and the digital world thrived in 2025.

Every second, we send around 4.36 million emails, used 76,000GB (or 76TB) of mobile data, and spent 583million seconds of social media (or around 14billion hours per day) every second.

It's clear that the digital world has established itself as a prominent factor in the 21st century.

Our spending habits continued to turn to digital efficiency.

We spent an astonishing $217,380 online every second. This is roughly $6.85 TRILLION spend online every year. If you're not into e-commerce, this may be a good indicator to start. It's proving to be an great place to drive sales and find customers.

The gaming industry, despite having a tough time with the production of hardware due to the AI boom, produced some impressive revenue.

Around $5,980 was earned from games (be it console, online, mobile) every second. Bringing in $ 517 million per day or $188.8 billion per year is quite impressive.

What do you think?

2025 was a big year, and clearly every second can make a huge difference.

What do you think 2026 will be like? Let me know in the comments!

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