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It's a straightforward question. The entire planet was covered by city. You don't see very many trees in the movies. This doesn't mean there aren't any of course, but certainly nothing on the scale of the Amazon rain forests on Earth. What does everyone breathe?

Wookieepedia just says

Citizens who lived in the upper levels were able to breathe air that was filtered and clean. Sunlight never reached the lower levels which had to be lit by artificial light and the inhabitants were forced to breathe the air of toxic fumes from factory and vehicular waste.

Does this mean there was a clean-air utility that piped clean air (or atmosphere appropriate to your biology) to homes and offices? And the planet's own atmosphere is irredeemably toxic to humans?

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    So that implies people can only breathe without equipment indoors. And the atmosphere is toxic? Doesn't seem right, what with all the open airspeeders we see in the prequel trilogy.
    – Jay
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 8:15
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    @Jayraj- Is it inconceivable that there are large-scale air purifiers used for the whole planet? Perhaps the toxic air is just heavier and so sinks to the bottom.
    – PointlessSpike
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 8:39
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    It's not inconceivable, no. If that's the answer and has been mentioned in the prequel novelizations or EU material, please post it. This idea was mentioned on Reddit too
    – Jay
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 8:46
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    @Mooz He worked on a Moisture farm, in a desert (collecting dew and water from the atmosphere), so that makes sense, but has no correlation to country-sized air purifiers.
    – Vogie
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 14:06
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    Don't they use a space ship with a giant vacuum cleaner to suck clean air from other planets?
    – Jeremy French
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 17:43

2 Answers 2

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This is covered in the official novelisation for Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

The impression was not misleading. The days in which Coruscant could be viewed in any sort of natural state were dead and gone. The capital city had expanded over the centuries, building by building, until it wrapped the entire planet. Forests, mountains, bodies of water, and natural formations had been covered over. The atmosphere was filtered through oxygen regulators and purified by scrubbers, and water was gathered and stored in massive artificial aquifers. Native animals, birds, plants, and fish could be found in the museums or the climate-controlled indoor preserves. As Anakin Skywalker could clearly see from the viewport of Queen Amidala’s slowly descending transport, Coruscant had become a planet of skyscrapers, their gleaming metal towers stretching skyward in a forest of spear points, an army of frozen giants blanketing the horizon in every direction.

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I think I read in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, about air scrubbers positioned all around the planet. Also there is a vast subterranean ocean, that maybe used to help with air filtration.

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    "Seeing the planet from orbit was the only way to fully appreciate the enormity of the construction. Practically all of Coruscant’s landmass—which comprised almost all of its surface area, its oceans and seas having been drained or rerouted through huge subterranean caverns more than a thousand generations ago—was covered with a multitiered metropolis composed of towers, monads, ziggurats, palazzi, domes, and minarets...
    – Valorum
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 20:15
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    ...By day the many crosshatched levels of skycar traffic and the thousands of spaceships that entered and left its atmosphere almost blotted out views of the endless cityscape, but at night Coruscant revealed its full splendor, outshining at close range even the spectacular nebulae and globular clusters of the nearby Galactic Core. The planet radiated so much heat energy that, were it not for thousands of strategically placed CO2 reactive dampers in the upper atmosphere, it would long ago have been transformed into a lifeless rock by a rampant atmospheric degeneration."
    – Valorum
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 20:15

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