An analysis published Wednesday found that “exposure to toxic air, water, soil, and chemical pollution” kills 8.3 million people worldwide each year, with the United States among the 10 countries that have the most pollution-related premature deaths—underscoring the necessity of urgent, collaborative efforts to safeguard public health.

Putting the total mortality figure into context, 2019 Pollution and Health Metrics: Global, Regional, and Country Analysis (pdf) notes: “Pollution kills three times as many people a year as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Pollution is responsible for 15 times the number of deaths caused by war and other forms of violence each year.”

Based on the findings, the group behind the new report, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), has three main messages for both policymakers and the public:

• Pollution is the largest environmental threat to health;
• Pollution has been severely neglected and has not received adequate attention at private or government levels; and
• Pollution can be controlled with solutions that already exist.

Richard Fuller, chair of the GAHP board of directors and the report’s co-author, emphasized the need for people across the globe to come together in the fight to prevent premature deaths from pollution.

“In order to tackle pollution, we must prioritize it as an issue that affects us all, integrating it into health planning, and increasing funding to allow more research into pollution, such as monitoring pollution and its effects, and developing ways to control pollution,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “Pollution prevention can be highly cost-effective—helping to improve health and reduce climate impacts, while boosting economies.”

For the analysis, GAHP used 2017 data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which shows a range of 7–10 million total premature deaths, with five million tied to air pollution. However, the report notes that some recent studies featured higher figures for air pollution deaths, referencing a World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of about seven million and a European study that settled on nearly nine million.

The report serves as an update to an October 2017 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which was based on 2015 data and found that pollution kills nine million people each year. The reductions over the two years “mostly reflect changes in calculations of methodology related to air pollution,” according to GAHP.

Acknowledging the previous study, the report says that “overall, the results show an improvement in the number of premature deaths from traditional types of pollution—sanitation and household air contaminated by smoke from cook stoves—from 2015 to 2017.”

“But premature deaths from modern pollution, those types of pollution caused by industrialization and urbanization, are on the rise,” the report explains.

The more than eight million annual deaths tied to pollution “are spread unevenly amongst the countries of the world,” with the top 10 countries accounting for about two-thirds of the total figure. An estimated 3.4 million of those deaths, or about 40%, are related to air pollution.