Regional Analysis of Death Rate due to Air Pollution in Turkey and its Neighbors

Abstract

Air pollution is the contamination of the internal or external environment of any chemical, physical or biological material and altering the natural properties of the atmosphere. Air pollution is caused by natural causes such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires, or excessive evaporation, as well as by increasing traffic density, especially by artificial causes such as fuel types used by urban inhabitants and industrialization. Each year, countries keep statistics of deaths caused by different types of direct air pollution or indirectly by diseases caused by these different types of pollution. In this study, the impact of countries’ geographical region and population density on mortality rates due to air pollution is analyzed. A dataset of Turkey and the twenty six countries covers information such as the population density, different types of pollution rates, number of deaths caused by each type of pollution and their ratios to current population number throughout a time period between 1990-2017. In the data analysis, air pollution types were examined one by one and it was sought to identify the similarities among countries. As a result of these analysis, it was shown that there are similarities between Turkey and the different neighbour countries on the death cases observed due to different types of air pollution.