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The World Risk Poll: an evolving evidence base on global risk and safety

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This page was written by Dr Aaron Ions Gardner, Caitlin Vaughan, Nancy Hey

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In this blog, Nancy Hey, Aaron Gardner and Caitlin Vaughan from the Foundation’s evidence and insight team explain how the World Risk Poll, our flagship research programme, is evolving in 2025.

Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll questions

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What’s new in 2025?

In a world characterised by rapid change and evolving challenges, understanding how people perceive, experience, and respond to risk has never been more crucial. 

Launched in 2019, the World Risk Poll is the first global study that systematically explores how people perceive and experience risk in their daily lives. Conducted every two years, in partnership with Gallup, it gathers responses from over 145,000 individuals across more than 140 countries, offering a truly global perspective. 

Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s commitment to open and accessible data ensures that insights from the World Risk Poll can have real impact to improve people’s safety. For policymakers, the data provides a roadmap to addressing vulnerabilities and allocating resources effectively. For researchers, the Poll offers a robust dataset to advance our understanding of human behaviour in the face of risks and uncertainty.

In 2025, data collection will take place for the fourth edition of the Poll, with the results to be published in 2026. To give you a taste of what to expect, we have today published the full question set being asked to people around the world as part of the 2025 World Risk Poll, as part of a handy reference document that includes all questions asked in every edition of the Poll to date. We hope the 2025 Poll will continue to provide meaningful data and actionable insights.

 

What’s new in 2025?

In the 2025 edition of the World Risk Poll, we are drilling deeper into several existing core topics on risk and resilience, with questions designed to enable greater impact in these areas:

  • In all three editions to date, we have asked people whether they view climate change as a risk to their country in the next 20 years. For the 2025 Poll, we have expanded this further by asking people how they think other people in their country view climate change. These ’second order perceptions’ can be powerful influencers of people’s feelings of agency in the face of climate change, and how driven or able they feel to act.
  • A major aspect of climate change is the increasing frequency and severity of severe weather-related events. In the three prior editions of the Poll, we have captured peoples’ experiences of, and worry about, such events in a general sense. In the 2025 Poll, we explore this in more detail, asking about their worry and experience of harm from acute weather events such as tropical storms, longer-term weather events such as drought or persistent flooding, and from wildfires in particular.
  • In 2025, we will repeat our Resilience Index for a third time. The Index, and the granular and longitudinal data that powers it, has proved an invaluable tool to help policymakers identify specific populations or demographics who may be more at risk of experiencing harm from disasters arising from severe weather events, or from other threats such as global inflationary pressures.
  • In this edition of the Poll, we will also expand our understanding of how people receive warnings about disasters, and importantly, if they were able to act on these warnings. These questions, together with wider demographic data and the aforementioned Resilience Index, will prove incredibly useful in identifying the most at risk populations globally.

 

How to get involved

This edition of the World Risk Poll will be collected during the latter half of 2025, and we expect to release the first findings and associated data in 2026.

We invite policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders to contact us to discuss how they may be able to make use of the 2025 poll data, and how the Foundation can support you to do so – whether by providing technical support, early access to the data, or through one of our ‘Turning the World Risk Poll Into Action’ funding calls.

We are also keen to hear from those who would like to partner with us to help secure the longer-term sustainability of the World Risk Poll by co-funding modules focused on global challenges. You can contact the team at [email protected].