The Global Change Data Lab is a non-profit research organization in the education sector. Its purpose is to advance education in how global living conditions and the earth’s environment are changing, through the production and maintenance of public online resources and related products.

They focus on solving five big problems.

1. Daily news is not enough to know about the world: the Global Change publishes data and research to bring attention to large, yet slow transformative processes (e.g. historical reductions in child mortality) that are rarely covered by the media.

2. To understand how our world is changing we need statistics: Its mission is to make data about the world available and understandable to give everyone the research to develop a worldview that goes beyond anecdotes and single events.

3. Academic research is disconnected from public discourse: Research is often hidden behind paywalls, buried in spreadsheets, and written for a specialist audience only. Global Change explains and disseminates important findings that would otherwise be inaccessible to a general audience.

4. Lacking awareness of progress makes us cynical: Global Change shows that in many ways living conditions around the world are getting better; communicating this enables people to pursue more of what works and to be motivated to engage with the challenges that we face.

5. Professors and teachers need understandable, free, and up-to-date teaching material on global development: The price of textbooks is often prohibitively high and especially in developing countries educators lack relevant material. Global Change prepares the work to be used as teaching material by everyone without restriction.