Deaths from air pollution
What you should know about this indicator
- Air pollution is one of the leading risk factors for early death worldwide.
- Air pollution — particularly very small particles called particulate matter — can infiltrate the lungs, airways and respitatory system, increasing the risk of several of the most common health conditions, including heart disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections, lung cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
- Indoor, or household, pollution is usually generated from burning wood, other biomass, or charcoal for cooking and heating. This is common in lower-income countries where people do not have alternative, cleaner fuels.
- Outdoor air pollution is often generated from burning fossil fuels for electricity production, emissions from industry, or tailpipe emissions from vehicles.
- These estimates of premature deaths come from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease study.
- Premature deaths are modelled based on estimates of peoples' exposure to air pollution, and epidemiological models of how this increases the risk of various diseases.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Deaths from air pollution”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2021) - “Air Pollution”. Data adapted from IHME, Global Burden of Disease. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260331-103338/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.html [online resource] (archived on March 31, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
IHME, Global Burden of Disease (2025) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
IHME, Global Burden of Disease (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Deaths from air pollution – IHME” [dataset]. IHME, Global Burden of Disease, “Global Burden of Disease - Risk Factors - Deaths” [original data]. Retrieved April 14, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260331-103338/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.html (archived on March 31, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ihme-deaths-air-pollution.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear