Measuring Risk and Safety Worldwide With Lloyd's Register Foundation
Before we can make the world a safer place for all people, we must first understand the risks people face around the world and how individuals perceive those risks.
The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll provides the first global picture of how people around the world see risk and safety and the differences between their perceptions of risk and their actual lived experiences.
The purpose of the World Risk Poll is not just to illustrate risk and safety issues around the world, but also to empower communities and organizations to take action to reduce risk and harm based on shared knowledge and lessons learned.
Read on to learn about the challenge, the approach and the outcome.
150,000+
respondents
140+
countries and territories included
"The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll represents the views of 98% of the world's population on safety and risk, including many people whose voices have never been heard before. Knowing what people think will help us to identify gaps between people's thoughts about risk and their experiences of threats to their safety. We can use this data to work with communities and empower people to take action most likely to reduce harm -- that saves lives and helps them feel safe."
Richard Clegg, Chief Executive
Download The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll report from 2020.
How Do We Quantify Risk and Safety Across the World?
At its core, the mission of Lloyd's Register Foundation is to make the world a safer place. But the Foundation understands that making the world a safer place isn't just about improving physical safety -- it's also about how people feel about risk and safety, and whether they believe they are safer too.
As with any journey, the first step toward improving people's perceptions of their individual safety was to find out how they feel about risk and safety to begin with. But no such data existed. That's why the Foundation partnered with Gallup to develop the World Risk Poll.
Giving a Voice to the Individual
Lloyd's Register Foundation partnered with the Gallup World Poll to develop the World Risk Poll -- a survey that is the first of its kind. The poll features interviews with more than 150,000 people in 142 countries and territories and includes data from areas where little or no data on the subject of people's perceptions and experiences of risk and safety existed before.
The World Risk Poll asked people questions about their perceived risk to safety individually, at work, with food, the internet, climate change, etc.
The full dataset is freely available to the public, thanks to Lloyd's Register Foundation -- after all, if the goal is to make the world a safer place, the more people contributing to the effort, the better.
Using Data to Empower and Inform Policy
The first World Risk Poll report was published in October 2020 based on data collected in 2019. The findings and report's release sparked the interest of media outlets across the world, including Forbes, CGTN, Gulf News and AllAfrica, to name a few.
Lloyd's Register Foundation also developed a guide to the World Risk Poll along with risk literacy innovators from communities around the world to help clarify who answered these questions and what those answers tell us.
Featured in: Forbes, AllAfrica, Gulf News
The next iteration of the World Risk Poll data and report is scheduled for publication in 2022, with data collected in 2021. As with the 2019 poll, the 2021 poll will ask people how safe they feel, their views on the biggest sources of risk to safety, and questions about worry and experience, including harm from the work they do.
In addition, in 2021 there are new modules -- developed in collaboration with the International Labour Organization -- focused on workplace violence and harassment, resilience, disaster risk, and risk from AI.
The data and insights will also help us better understand how the pandemic affected perceptions and experiences of risk and safety among the world's population.
