Staggering Sums

According to recent U.N. figures the ongoing strife in Pakistan has now displaced more than a million people. In Sri Lanka, months of fighting have left an estimated 265,000 people displaced. And in recent days the United Nations upped its estimate for the number of displaced in central and east Africa to 11 million throughout 16 countries.

Meanwhile, a new U.N. report shows that urban areas around the world are groaning under the weight of poor migrants. Roughly a billion people now live in slums or shanty towns across the globe. That's almost a sixth of humanity living in places like Kibera, the sprawling slum at the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. The U.N. report stresses that urban crowding raises the risk of human catastrophe in increasingly frequent natural disasters related to climate change.

If those statistics aren’t dizzying enough, click here for a real-time world clock with streaming data on everything from traffic accidents to replanted forestland.