1. Safety Perceptions Index 2023 Foundation: Understanding the impact of risk around the world
- Author:
- Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP)
- Publication Date:
- 02-2023
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
- Abstract:
- 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.1 Multiple studies have shown that the pandemic brought about increased levels of fear and anxiety across groups.2 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.
- Topic:
- Economics, Infrastructure, Risk, Peace, Threat Perception, and Public Safety
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus