Road Traffic Injuries
Road crashes are the leading killer of young people worldwide and a top-ten cause of death overall.
Severity score
73.2
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Steady
What this is
Roughly 1.2 million people die on the world's roads every year and tens of millions are injured, over 90 percent of them in low and middle income countries. It is the single largest cause of death for people aged 5 to 29. The toll is highly tractable through vehicle standards, speed management, road design and enforcement, but is rarely treated as a crisis because it accrues one crash at a time.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
86Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
82People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
88Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
35Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
40Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.