Harm channels
Harm reaches people in four ways, and each is counted differently because each is known differently. Two are recorded when they happen — a death in battle, a death at work. Two are estimated from what causes them — unsafe water, polluted air. That difference decides what can be said about them.
Three of the four kinds of harm have data. Their totals appear side by side and are never added together, because one person can be in two of them at once — a miner killed in an armed attack is both a war death and a death at work — and nobody has yet measured how often that happens. Adding them would be the easiest way to publish a wrong number, and this page will not do it.
What is in the records
Every figure here is the publisher’s own, shown with the credit its licence asks for. None of it has yet been linked to a product, a company or a material — that is a later step, and it is the step people will argue about.
| Channel | Deaths in the records | Countries | Years | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Conflict and political violence
C1 |
4,257,891 | 126 | 1989–2025 | loaded |
|
Work
C2 |
1,348,184 | 144 | 1970–2024 | loaded |
|
Poverty
C3 |
856,559 | 183 | 2019 | loaded |
|
Pollution C4 |
— | — | — | no rows — evidence missing |
|
Use phase C5 |
— | — | — | future work |
There is no total row on this table, and its absence is deliberate. Until the overlaps below are measured, no honest total exists, and a number that cannot be defended is worse than a gap that can be explained.
Deaths only. Injuries are counted directly for work, estimated for war, and not available for the other two.
Why the columns are not added
One person can be harmed in two of these ways at once. A miner shot during an attack on the mine where he works is recorded as a war death by the people who count war deaths, and as a death at work by the people who count those. Both records are right. Adding them counts him twice.
There are four such overlaps between these kinds of harm. Each needs to be measured — how much of one kind’s harm also appears in another — and none has been yet. Until they are, this page shows four numbers and no fifth.
| Overlap between | What is counted twice | Overlap |
|---|---|---|
| C1 × C2 | Workers killed at work by organised violence — a miner shot during an armed attack on the site he is working. UCDP counts him as a conflict death because an organised actor killed him; a labour inspectorate would count him as an occupational fatality because he died at work. Both are right. | not measured |
| C1 × C3 | Siege famine and conflict cholera. A child who dies of cholera in a besieged city is an indirect conflict death and a WASH-attributable death at once, because the conflict is what destroyed the water system. | not measured |
| C2 × C4 | Occupational exposure counted twice — a worker whose lung disease is attributed both to workplace carcinogens (C2 disease) and to ambient particulates (C4). | not measured |
| C3 × C4 | Indoor against outdoor air. Household air pollution from cooking fuel (C3) and ambient PM2.5 (C4) act on the same lungs, and the published attributions for each are computed against different counterfactuals — WHO publishes a "joint effects" figure precisely because adding the two overstates. | not measured |
An unmeasured overlap is recorded as unmeasured, not as zero. The two are different claims: one says nobody has looked, the other says somebody looked and found nothing. Only the first is true here.
What is missing
Listed rather than estimated. Every one of these makes the published figures lower than the truth, and none of them makes them higher.
- Deaths a war causes indirectly — through the hunger and disease it brings rather than its weapons — are not counted anywhere. Published estimates put them at three to fifteen times the deaths in fighting.
- Diseases caused by work are missing. Injuries at work are counted; the cancers and lung diseases that appear decades after working with dust or chemicals are not, and international estimates put those at about four times the deaths from injuries.
- Hunger is missing, and it is the largest gap in the poverty figures. Nobody has yet read and cited the research that measures how much of it the economy causes.
- Air pollution, indoors and outdoors, is missing from both kinds of harm it belongs to. Estimates of its deaths are published, but not the share of each kind of death it causes — and a death whose share of its cause cannot be stated is not counted here.
- Work statistics cover people inside the reporting system, not everyone who works. Informal and small-scale work — where conditions are most dangerous — is mostly left out, exactly where it matters most.
- Harm from USING a product — road deaths, exhaust fumes, firearms, tobacco — is a fifth kind of harm, planned for later. Every figure here covers making things only.
Questions
Why not just add the channels up?
Because some people are in two of them. The four places that happens are listed above, and none has been measured, so any total would be too high by an unknown amount. Adding them up would take a second, and it will not be done until the overlaps have been measured.
Are these HumanToll’s figures?
No. They are the publishers’ own — Uppsala University, the International Labour Organization, Eurostat, the World Health Organization — shown with the credit their licences ask for, and with the exact version of the data file they came from. HumanToll’s own figures link harm to products, and none is published yet.
Which kinds are counted and which are estimated?
War and work are counted: someone saw the death and recorded it. Poverty and pollution are estimated: nobody sees a death "from unsafe water", so research is used to work out what share of, say, diarrhoea deaths unsafe water causes. The second kind is weaker, and is always labelled that way.
Does a kind of harm with no data mean there is no harm?
The opposite. It means the harm is real but the evidence needed to count it has not been gathered yet — usually because the most complete source has a licence this project cannot use. An empty row says something about this project, not about the world.