On any average day, 165,000 people die globally. That's 60 million a year. What do they die from?

To answer this, my colleagues Sophia Mersmann and Fiona Spooner built an interactive visualization of causes of death across the world.1 In this article, I'll give a few snapshots of how this compares across countries at different income levels.

But the real power is in exploring the tool for yourself -- you can do that for your own country at the end of this page.

Below, you can see the causes of death for the world as a whole. The total size of the visualization represents the entire 60 million global deaths, and the size of each rectangle -- each one a different cause of death -- is proportional to its share of the total. (This is called a treemap.)

Three-quarters of global deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which are shown in blue. Heart disease alone accounts for one in three deaths. Cancers are almost one in five.

What did people die from in 2023?


The size of the entire visualization represents the total number of deaths globally in 2023: 60.0 million. Each rectangle within is proportional to the share of deaths due to a particular cause.

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