Biden posted around 2,500 tweets containing more than 80,000 words from 2021 to the end of 2023, a fraction of his predecessor’s communication through the platform. An overview of the most frequently mentioned keywords confirms some of the priorities that Biden wanted to be seen, with keywords such as ‘jobs’, and ‘economy’ dominating his messages.
Trump actively made politics through Twitter, while Biden’s tweets can rather be seen as reflections of his politics. Here lies the value in analysing his activity on a platform that Trump used on a daily – and often unfiltered – basis while he was on office.
Biden’s tweets also show where his geopolitical priorities were during his first presidential years. While the President uses X heavily for domestic statements, he did make active references to countries from around the world when it was most important to his political messaging. More than 1,200 references were made to another country during his first three years in office. The countries that dominated his global agenda from January 2021 to December 2023 were Ukraine (mentioned in 228 tweets), Russia (204), Israel (78), Palestine (74), Japan and South Korea (49 each). The United Kingdom follows in eighth place (40 mentions) after Ireland (45).
This list of countries is primarily a clear reflection of the global political issues of the ‘western’ world, particularly the Ukraine war and in the conflict in Israel/Palestine. This is a clear deviation from his predecessor’s geopolitical priorities, from Trump’s domestic agenda of building a wall along the US-Mexico border, to trade wars with China and his engagement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Biden’s global engagement appears much more responsive to escalating conflicts (where he sees an American interest) rather than more actively trying to reshape the world.
This could be seen as a re-alignment of presidential priorities to a more domestic policy agenda following the Covid years, but also an era of reactive rather than proactive re-setting of US foreign ambitions in a more pragmatic and at times more western-centric way. This reactive approach to foreign policy is also reflected in the temporal shift of references to countries over Biden’s three years in office.

In 2021, Afghanistan was the main priority following the Taliban’s return to power there, with references to other countries – mainly political allies such as the UK, Canada, or Germany – having played a minor additional role in Biden’s tweets. In 2022, as the Ukraine war came to dominate foreign policy, Biden tested Trump-style messaging, using the phrase ‘Putin’s Price Hike’ in repeated remarks about gas price hikes, clearly playing to a domestic audience. In 2023, Ukraine remained relevant but was later taken over by references to Israel and Palestine and the ongoing conflict there. In that year Biden also made unusually many references to Ireland around St Patrick’s Day and in the run-up to his state visit to Ireland in April.
Biden’s foreign policy, as interpreted from these tweets, suggests a strategy that is more aligned with traditional US diplomatic practices of coalition-building and responding to crises in line with American interests. This approach could imply a steadier but less transformative US influence on the global stage, with a focus on managing existing alliances and international norms rather than pursuing radical changes. The implications of this shift could mean a more predictable and multilateral US foreign policy if Biden stands and wins in November, but also raises questions about America’s ability to lead on new global challenges and shape future geopolitical landscapes. With a presidential election on the horizon, the direction of US foreign policy may become unpredictable yet again.

Geographic Views: These maps present data based on actual locations, showing where parties have won and highlighting regional voting trends. They are intuitive and correspond to real-world locations, helping readers understand how local issues influence voting behaviour.
Constituency Views: Commonly seen in media, these maps display each constituency as a uniform unit, such as a hexagon, avoiding spatial distortions from varying constituency sizes. They emphasize the distribution of votes and party support without the bias of large, sparsely populated areas, reflecting the equal weight of each vote.
Population Views: These maps scale geographic areas to reflect population size, highlighting urban areas with more voters and reducing the visual impact of rural areas. They offer a more accurate representation of voting power, showing how densely populated areas influence election outcomes.
Shown below are a series maps that go beyond depicting the winning party in each constituency, showing second-place candidates, vote shares, and overall turnout. Labour’s historic 412-seat majority with only 33.7 percent of the vote share is notable. Many constituencies were won by narrow margins, and the rise of smaller parties, capturing 42.5 percent of votes nationwide, is significant. Additionally, the election saw a historically low turnout of 60 percent, indicating voter disillusionment.
The 2024 general election has significantly reshaped the UK’s political landscape. While Labour achieved a landslide victory, Keir Starmer’s parliamentary majority remains fragile. The rise of smaller parties raises questions about the future dominance of the major parties in upcoming elections.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Map Animation 1970 to 2016

The animation shows each map proportional to the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions per year, growing in size with the growing amount of emissions. Each country is also proportional to its total emissions in that year. The emissions documented here show the countries where they occur, so that major producers for the global markets (especially China) keep growing considerably in that time period as they become integral part of the globalised markets and major producers for the consuming countries in the wealthy world, mostly Europe and North America.
The time series is based on data published in the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research by the European Commissions Joint Research Centre, an independent, global database of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollution on Earth.

The new website is proving more popular than ever before. Shortly after the relaunch we switched to a new web server in order to cope with the increased usage. As we are doing most of the work in our spare time and receive no external funding, we have to rely on commercial users being willing to support us through licensing or commissioning maps. This makes it sometimes difficult to fund only our running costs of an own server and equipment, not even mentioning our work and effort that we spend on Worldmapper all in our free time while having other jobs for a living.

Therefore we need your help, too. If you like our work and want to show your appreciation, please consider a donation that will help us to keep Worldmapper running and expanding.

Your support – as small or large as it may be – would really make a difference in helping us to keep Worldmapper going as an educational resource for everyone to enjoy.

CO₂ Emissions per capita 2016

A map of the global CO₂ emissions in 2016 provides an insight into the side of the ‘culprits’, who themselves can be viewed from different angles. The data shown in the first cartogram displays each country of the world resized by their total fossil CO₂ emissions (excluding effects of deforestation which accounts for 11 per cent of these emissions). Overlaid are the relative emissions in tons per capita in that year. By absolute quantity, China is the largest contributor, followed by the USA and India. The three countries account for approximately half the quantity of emissions in this dataset. At the same time these three countries differ significantly in their relative contribution: The USA is with 15.56 tons CO₂ per capita among the worst contributors, while China has approximately half (7.45) and India a fraction of that (1.92). These relative contributions are used as negotiating positions that emerging (as well as developing) countries need to increase emissions in order to achieve economic success.
Such patterns can be observed around the world, so that the maintaining or even increasing economic output – usually with increased emissions as a trade-off – lies in the national interest of many countries. For concerted action towards tackling climate change, the largest contributors would obviously have the biggest impact in reducing their emissions.
The political commitment to such changes has always been at the centre of global conventions on climate change that are adopted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the first serious effort to not only acknowledging a role of humans in global warming, but to also implement measures to reducing this impact.

CO2 Emissions Changes 1990 to 2015

Nevertheless, ever since the agreement was signed, CO₂ emissions have been steadily rising, largely fuelled by considerable global economic growth. The second pair of cartograms show how individual countries have been contributing to these increases, and to a much smaller extent which countries managed a relative decline in that period.
The largest absolute CO2 emission increases between 1990 and 2015 came from emerging economies, most notably China, and to a smaller extent India, amongst other countries. Other regions, especially Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia, have seen declines in the same period.
However, rather than these declines being due to radical political intervention or commitments of these countries, many of these changes can be attributed to rather indirect political changes. The fall of the iron curtain and a process of deindustrialisation of the most polluting industries there, therefore the results of a political and an economic transition.
What the data shown in these visualisations demonstrates is the lack of serious political will or incapability of the global community to genuine address human-made climate change at the level of international agreements. As this longer-term perspective demonstrates, this is not a phenomenon of recent years, rather than has been endemic ever since the Kyoto protocol. National economic interests have always undermined the small attempts of finding a joint global strategy. The more recent dominance of populist politics in those countries that are also major contributors to this problem will most likely make the quest for solutions through international agreements even more difficult. Whether this means that strategies for mitigating and containing the effects of anthropogenic climate change will become obsolete is still an unanswered question. But new solutions for adaptation to the new realities of a changed global climate seems inevitable at significant economic costs – which could become the price for a lack of global political leadership.

This cartogram animation uses satellite observations from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MOD17) that is able to detect the cumulative composite Gross Primary Production (GPP) of the biosphere on land. This productivity is nature’s ‘fuel for life‘ as it gives us an idea of how the biosphere is utilising the sun’s energy to support its organisms, turning plants into the biomass factories that support life higher up the foodchain.
When and where nature ecosystems are most productive depends a lot on the time of the year. The animation of productivity shows how the changing seasons determine the variability of energy production throughout the year. Distribution of landmasses lead to the tropics being over-proportionally present in this image, especially in the northern hemisphere’s winter.
The following (static) map shows how the annual picture that emerges when adding up nature’s productivity throughout the year. Here it becomes clearer that not only solar radiation, but also other factors have an influence on the productivity of terrestrial ecosystems: Desert areas, such as Sahara or the Australian outback, remain small in this picture.

All maps above show the land surface resized according to its annual gross primary production (GPP) in terms of their carbon currency (g C m-2). Each transformed grid cell in the map is proportional to the total (annual or monthly) production in that area which is also indicated through the colours that are overlaid.