"When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" is a song written by Sting that was first released by The Police on their 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta. A medley of "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" with another song from Zenyatta Mondatta, "Voices Inside My Head", reached No. 3 on the Billboard Dance Music/Club Play Singles chart in 1981. In 2000, a remix version credited to Different Gear versus the Police reached No. 28 on the UK charts.

"When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" was one of Sting's earliest attempts at a song whose lyrics deal with concerns of the outside world rather than just his own issues. Ellie O'Day of Vancouver Free Press describes the lyrics as being mostly a "repetitive chant". Sting regards the song as having a post-apocalyptic vision, something it shares with an earlier Police song, "Bring on the Night", from the 1979 album Reggatta de Blanc. Sting has said of the two songs "such vanity as to imagine one's self as the sole survivor of a holocaust with all one's favorite things still intact".

"When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" and "Bring on the Night" also share their chord progression.Rolling Stone critic David Fricke notes a structural similarity between "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" and two different songs from Reggatta de Blanc, "Walking on the Moon" and "The Bed's Too Big without You". Like those two Reggatta de Blanc songs, "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" repeats its three-chord progression over its nearly four-minute length. Fricke regards the chord progression as "hypnotic".

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