If the world were a person, what would your day-to-day be like? That is the initial question that a group of researchers asked themselves and that they have recently resolved. As? Compiling information on the economic and non-economic activities that the bulk of the world’s population, 8,000 million people, carry out in a day. There are a total of approximately 190,000 million human hours per day that the research team -of which the UAB Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) has formed part- has analyzed to try to estimate, for the first time, what a day in the life of the world
Obviously, the study pursues a specific objective, which is none other than understanding the overall functioning of the human system. So that? To know where there is potential for change. And it is that the way we use time –defend the researchers- impacts our environment.
“Solutions to global problems such as climate change and inequality often seem difficult to understand,” explains Eric Galbraith, a researcher at ICTA-UAB, McGill University (Canada) and lead author of the study, published in the journal La Vanguardia. PNAS magazine. Frequently, he continues, we know a lot about such problems locally, “but we can’t see the big picture.” The research, in this sense, “aims to provide a new way of seeing what humanity is doing in a broader scope in order to have a better understanding and help coordinate action towards the sustainable development goals” .
To find out what humanity’s time allocation is like, the researchers calculated the average over all people and in all countries. They examined data on time use and work collected over the period 2000-2019 (to avoid any impact of the covid pandemic on the results) in more than 140 countries, representing 87% of the world’s population.
In turn, they classified all the actions that all the inhabitants of the planet carry out in a day, including work and non-work activities, depending on the purpose of the activity. And immediately afterwards they established 24 categories that they divided into three large groups: those intended to alter the outside world (supply or modification of food, energy, buildings, maintenance of the environment, etc.); those focused directly on the minds or bodies of people (hygiene and care of personal appearance, state of mind, health of oneself and others, education, religion, hobbies, socialization, sports, media, rest, etc. ); and the organization of activities within society (transportation, commerce, finance, law or governance).
Next, they classified almost 4,000 unique activities, discovering curious things like, for example, that most of the time is dedicated to activities focused on the same human being: just over 9 hours. “They are actions such as socializing, resting, watching television, eating, personal hygiene and grooming, education, medical care or child care,” argues Galbraith.
Sleeping, or being in bed, means 9 more hours (the global estimate includes young people, who tend to sleep more hours). Of the remaining 6 hours, growing and gathering food, preparation, travel, and tasks related to trade, finance, sales, legislation, governance, or surveillance take about one hour each. All infrastructure and building construction is done in about 15 minutes.
Curiously, only 1 minute of the world day is devoted to waste management, in clear contrast to the 45 minutes dedicated to tidying up and maintaining our homes. “We’re not good at coordinating when it comes to dealing with waste issues,” laments Galbraith.
The time dedicated to activities such as meals, daily commuting, personal hygiene and cleanliness, and food preparation does not change systematically according to the material wealth of a population. However, the time spent growing and gathering food varies greatly depending on this variable: from more than 1 hour in low-income countries, to less than 5 minutes in high-income countries.
Researchers estimate that the entire world economy takes up about 2.6 hours of the average human day. This activity is dominated by agriculture and livestock, followed by activities such as commerce, finance and law, and the manufacturing industry. Although it may seem low, the authors of the study recall that the active population represents only about half of the world’s population and that those 2.6 hours would be equivalent to a 40-hour day for employed people.
The results of the study offer, in the opinion of the researchers, a unique perspective of how economic activities fit into the general fabric of human life on a global scale. They also suggest -they add- that there is a lot of room to modify the distribution of time around certain activities, such as the extraction of materials, the supply of energy and waste management, all carried out in about 7 minutes.
