Revisiting the forecasts made in the 2019 World Risk Poll report
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Busayo Onanaye, Junior Data Analyst
Since 2019, the world has undergone a profound socio-economic transformation, driven by a convergence of crises. The COVID-19 pandemic, escalating geopolitical tensions, and the accelerating impacts of climate-related disasters have converged to reshape how communities and nations across the globe consume information and act on perceptions of risk.
That same year, the Lloyd's Register Foundation launched the World Risk Poll, the first global survey designed to understand people’s perceptions and experiences of risk, harm, and feelings of personal safety. Three Polls have been conducted to date; in 2019, 2021 and 2023, each collecting data from roughly 140,000 people across some 140 countries.
Using the 2019 Poll data, the first report (published in 2020) made several predictions about how these rapidly shifting global conditions might reshape public attitudes towards safety and risk. Below, you can explore how well those predictions held up against the findings of the most recent Poll, where they diverged, and what the findings reveal about the evolving landscape of human risk perception worldwide.
These predictions were made in the 2019 World Risk Poll report. Click each drop down to read about each prediction in detail, and our analysis.
In all three waves of the World Risk Poll, respondents were asked: "Overall, compared to five years ago, do you feel more safe, less safe, or about as safe as you did five years ago?" Across every wave, the most common answer was "about as safe", changing little from 40% in 2019 to 41% in 2023. The proportion feeling safer dipped fractionally from 28% in 2019 to 27% in both 2021 and 2023, remaining broadly stable throughout.
The most notable movement came in the "less safe" category. Between 2019 and 2021, the share of respondents feeling less safe rose from 30% to 34%, a shift that aligned with the 2019 prediction that perceptions of being less safe would increase.
By 2023, however, that figure had eased back to 31%, suggesting the heightened anxiety captured during the pandemic period did not become a lasting trend. While "less safe" responses remain slightly above their 2019 baseline, the overall picture points towards a global public that has largely settled back into similar feelings of safety compared to when the Poll first began.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted society on an unprecedented scale. To evaluate the prediction that people in the worst-affected parts of the world would feel less safe, COVID-19 ‘impact scores’ were calculated for each country in our Poll, using data from ‘Our World In Data’. A ranking was constructed by taking into account the number of cases each country reported, number of deaths reported and excess mortality since January 2020 - although it should be noted that global COVID-19 data has well-documented limitations considering that reporting standards, testing capacity, and death-registration practices varied significantly between countries. Lower-income nations are likely underrepresented in official figures, so the impact scores used here should be understood as indicative rather than definitive.
When the thirty highest-scoring countries are grouped by region, Eastern Europe stands out as the most affected, accounting for half of the top thirty. Filtering the Poll data to Eastern European respondents reveals a pattern that initially mirrors the global trend but then diverges. Between 2019 and 2021, "less safe" responses rose from 21% to 27%, consistent with both the report prediction and the broader global increase. Unlike the global picture, however, this trend did not reverse. By 2023, "less safe" responses had climbed further to 32%, while feeling safer responses fell from 20% to 15%. "About as safe" responses dropped from 55% in 2019 to 52% in 2021, where they remained in 2023.
This sets Eastern Europe apart from the global pattern, where "less safe" responses eased back between 2021 and 2023 and "about as safe" figures rose slightly. The continued decline in feelings of safety likely reflects more than the lingering effects of COVID-19. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 introduced a major new source of insecurity across the region, compounding the pandemic's impact and helping to explain why feelings of safety kept deteriorating even as the global trend stabilised.
The report’s prediction held true between 2019 and 2021. What the data also shows is that in heavily affected regions, feelings of being less safe can deepen further when new crises emerge before recovery from the first has taken hold. It is a stark reminder that in a turbulent world, risks do not queue up neatly; they compound and leave communities less resilient to whatever comes next.
This prediction hypothesised on whether Latin America would continue to be the region most likely to feel less safe. Figure 3 shows that the most common response to the ‘feelings of safety’ question was ‘less safe’ for Poll respondents in Latin America and the Caribbean. This contrasts with the most popular response at the global level and in Eastern Europe - ‘about as safe’. This shows that respondents in Latin America and the Caribbean were more likely to feel less safe compared with Poll respondents in the rest of the world.
Figure 3 also shows that over the Poll’s three previous waves, respondents answering that they felt ‘less safe’ in Latin America and the Caribbean decreased and ‘more safe’ responses increased. This meant that in waves 2 and 3 of the Poll (2021 and 2023), Southern Africa replaced Latin America and the Caribbean as the region most likely to answer ‘less safe’.
Overall, we can see that the prediction that respondents in Latin America and the Caribbean were more likely to see an increase in ‘less safe’ responses in 2020 was incorrect, even though ‘less safe’ responses were more frequent than at the global level.
The Poll asks respondents about their worries and experiences of harm in various aspects of life. In our evaluation of this prediction, we chose to focus on worry about harm and experiences of harm in the areas of food, water and crime. In 2019 when these predictions were made, food, water and crime were amongst the top five most frequently named worries. Violent crime has remained one of the top worries in subsequent waves of the Poll.
In Figure 4, we show the distribution of total worry responses to the following question for each area: In general, how WORRIED are you that each of the following things could cause you serious harm?
From 2019 to 2023, total food and water worries decreased year-on-year. Total worry is calculated here as the sum of ‘very worried’ and ‘somewhat worried’ responses. In contrast to the 2019 prediction that worry would rise, food-related worry in fact fell by five percentage points, and water-related worry fell by six points. In contrast, crime-related worry has remained broadly similar over the Poll’s waves.
Experiences of harm have also shifted across the Poll’s waves, recorded in the responses to the Poll question: Have you or someone you PERSONALLY know EXPERIENCED serious harm from any of the following things in the past TWO years?
Figure 5 shows the percentage of respondents who said they have experienced these types of harm, know someone who has, or both. The graphs show that reports of food and crime-related harm have remained similar wave-on-wave, with slight upticks in ‘yes’ responses. For experiences of harm from water, ‘yes’ responses have been static.
Overall, we saw a decrease in worry expressed about food and water and a slight increase in worry about crime. In terms of harm, we saw very minimal rises in harm from food and crime, but experience of harm from water remained steady.
Finally, we explore how workplace harm responses have trended across the Poll. In contrast to the prediction, Figure 7 shows that levels of reported workplace harm have remained the same.
On 23 June 2026 we will launch the first report from the fourth edition of the World Risk Poll, using data gathered throughout 2025. This report will explore how worry and experience of harm have changed since 2023, on safety issues ranging from harm from food and water and road crashes, to the generational and existential threat of climate change.
Register for the launchIn this blog, Giulia Maistrello, Senior Analyst at RAND Europe introduces the findings from two new reports. These reports underpin the Global Safety Evidence Centre’s new evidence programme on safe work, exploring both the evidence needs of safety practitioners and the evidence currently available to support them.
Professor Milena Nikolova from the University of Groningen is using World Risk Poll data to analyse how changing technologies affect safety in the workplace across different industries and countries, informing more targeted safety interventions.
Report: Occupational health and safety in the aquaculture industry – a global review.
