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Executive summary
The Lloyd’s Register Foundation Safety Perceptions Index (SPI) provides a comprehensive assessment of worries and experiences of risk across 121 countries. The SPI is a unique body of work, providing a deeper understanding of citizens’ feelings of safety than any other publicly available source. The index is produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) on the basis of data from the World Risk Poll, a global survey designed by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and administered by Gallup.
This is the second edition of the SPI. The report analyses two iterations of the World Risk Poll, the first conducted in 2019 and the second conducted in 2021; providing commentary, trends, and insights into these two sets of data. One of the defining features of the research is that one survey was administered prior to the onset of COVID-19 and the other was administered afterwards, allowing for an analysis of the effects of the pandemic on perceptions of risk. This report will be useful in the decades ahead as it will give insight into likely shifts in perceptions of risk for any future pandemics that may occur.
The SPI measures two themes, worry about harm and recent experience of serious harm, analysing them across five domains: food and water, violent crime, severe weather, mental health, and workplace safety. These themes and domains are combined into a composite score which reflects perceptions of safety by country and region.
The past several years have been characterised by rising feelings of uncertainty worldwide. Central to this shift has been the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted the functioning of social institutions as well as patterns of individual and collective behaviour in countless ways. Multiple studies have shown that the pandemic brought about increased levels of fear and anxiety across groups.
Against this backdrop, there are two central findings of the 2023 SPI report. The first is that there were two parallel developments in people’s perceptions of safety over the last several years. On the one hand, the index showed no meaningful change in levels of worry and experience of harm in the aggregate, with an improvement of less than 0.1 percentage points recorded between 2019 and 2021. On the other hand, complementary data from the World Risk Poll points to a notable rise in generalised and non-specific feelings of fear and lack of safety throughout the world, with people becoming more fearful overall but less certain about the sources of potential threats.
On this note, the report finds a rise in “ambiguous risk”. This refers to people’s sense that risk exists in the world around them but that it cannot always be defined. The rise in ambiguous risk can be seen in the responses to a World Risk Poll question on the greatest perceived threat in people’s daily lives. Between 2019 and 2021, the largest changes in response rates were for those saying that no risk existed in their lives, which fell by half, and those saying they did not know what their greatest risk was, which nearly doubled.
The second key finding is that, despite the negligible overall change, there were larger shifts in scores for the individual domains and the themes within those domains. While it was not possible to measure changes in one domain, workplace safety, among the four others, two improved and two deteriorated. The mental health domain recorded the largest deterioration, while the violent crime domain recorded the largest improvement. These results may in part be attributed to COVID-19, as the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns affected people’s mental wellbeing, while less physical contact and interaction have likely led to reductions in violent crime. As COVID-19 only ranked as the fourth most commonly cited threat to people’s daily safety, these findings suggest that it was the societal experience of the pandemic – more than the virus itself – that most impacted worries and experiences of risk.
Both worry and the experience of harm in relation to the food and water domain improved. However, these overall improvements represent averages across all of the countries surveyed and do not fully reflect the deteriorating food security and water stresses in certain vulnerable parts of the world. Low-income and conflict-ridden countries have recorded substantial deteriorations. Global undernourishment rates, for example, have been increasing since 2017 and reached over 750 million people in 2021, with 89 per cent of undernourished people residing in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the survey was completed prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has significantly stressed global food supply chains.
In 2021, more people experienced harm in the severe weather domain than in 2019, but levels of worry in the domain decreased. This finding aligns with a slight decline between 2019 and 2021 in concerns about the future impacts of climate change, which the World Risk Poll data also showed. These developments further suggest that the pandemic shifted perceptions of risk and likely displaced worries about perceived future threats with ones that were more immediate. Nevertheless, the marginal nature of the decline in climate concerns, even in the face of the immediate worries associated with the pandemic, could also be seen as a reflection of the effectiveness of global communications strategies to highlight the threat posed by climate change.
The worst scoring country in the 2023 SPI was Mali, which has experienced two recent coups and has been racked by multiple violent conflicts. On average, sub-Saharan Africa was the worst scoring region in the SPI; all of the five countries with the worst scores are located in the region, with four of them currently suffering from violent conflict.
There was less regional concentration in relation to the countries that performed best. The five countries with the best SPI scores comprise one from the Russia and Eurasia region, two from the Middle East and North Africa, and two from Europe. Uzbekistan was the best scoring country overall and, on average, the Russia and Eurasia region had the best scores of any region. This is a noteworthy result, given that countries in the Russia and Eurasia region do not typically rank highly in other measures of security and development. Their strong SPI scores were driven by their low rates of reported experience of harm.
SPI scores were also closely aligned with levels of peacefulness. This was true for both worry and experience. On average, very high peace countries recorded the best scores, and scores become progressively worse as levels of peace decline. This trend holds true across all domains except for mental health. Very high peace countries and very low peace countries had the highest rates of risk impact related to mental health concerns, while the middle peace countries had the lowest.
Between the two surveys there was a notable 4.2 percentage point increase in the number of people stating they felt less safe than at an earlier stage of their lives. The country with the biggest increase was Myanmar, where 58.7 per cent of the population felt this way in 2021, compared to 11.4 per cent in 2019. Myanmar was followed by Armenia, Vietnam, Nigeria and Turkey.
While the single most common response to the question about the greatest risk in people’s lives was “don’t know”, road accidents were the most commonly cited specific answer, followed by crime and violence and then by non-COVID-related health issues. COVID-19 was the fourth most commonly cited top risk. Financial and economic concerns were treated as two separate categories in the World Risk Poll data, but had they been combined, they would have constituted the third most commonly cited risk. Moreover, both of these categories increased over the two years.
Although road accidents were rated as the greatest risk, it was also the area that had the largest improvement between the two surveys, with the percentage of respondents citing it as their greatest risk dropping from 17.9 per cent to 12.9 per cent. Many factors may have affected this result, including short-term trends like less road traffic due to COVID-19 and longer-term trends like improved car safety features and better road safety regulations.
In contrast to the 2019 World Risk Poll, which only measured the experience of harm based on a combined rate of first-hand and second-hand experience, the 2021 data provides disaggregated rates for the two. As such, in addition to overall experience rates, this edition of the SPI includes additional analysis on the basis of first-hand experience only.
In all five domains, worry exceeded first-hand experience, with the highest difference occurring in the violent crime domain, where rates of worry were more than six times higher than rates of first-hand experience. This is not necessarily surprising as the effects of violent crime can be severe, but also because expectations are often inflated by the levels of violence reported in news media and presented in entertainment programs.
Workplace safety was the only domain where the worry rate was not more than twice as high as the first-hand experience rate; in fact, worry and first-hand experience were basically on par for workplace safety, with the worry rate standing at 10.4 per cent, compared to a first-hand experience rate of 10.3 per cent.
Anxieties associated with employment and economic conditions rose between 2019 and 2021, which is unsurprising in light of the economic downturns precipitated by the pandemic. Over the two years, global unemployment rates increased from 5.4 per cent to 6.2 per cent, with youth experiencing the largest increase in unemployment. Unemployed people struggled the most on their present income, with 63.3 per cent struggling. This was followed by underemployed workers and full-time self-employed people. People of all employment statuses also became more dissatisfied with their current living conditions over the two years, though the largest increase occurred for people working full-time for employers, for whom dissatisfaction rates rose from 21.6 per cent to 30.7 per cent.
The 2023 SPI highlights the changing dynamics of risk that accompanied the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world is less certain about its future than at any time since the Cold War. The pandemic continues to impact every corner of the globe, inflation is rising, the Ukraine war has disrupted international relations, and economic growth has slowed and in some cases reversed. These global events will continue to shape the risk landscape at the local, national and international levels, highlighting the need for ongoing measurement and analysis of citizens’ perceptions of the threats they face in their daily lives.