After the storm: How disasters reshape resilience and trust
This report uses World Risk Poll Resilience Index data from 2021, 2023 and 2025 to examine the effect of disasters on different aspects of resilience.
A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope
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Global resilience, as measured by the latest World Risk Poll Resilience Index, is stable. However, this overall stability conceals two opposing trends between individual resilience and that of society as a whole; people perceive stronger institutions around them but show less confidence in their own ability to protect themselves and their families.
This report - one of three based on data from the 2026 World Risk Poll Resilience Index - explores these and other global resilience trends. Now in its third edition, the Index provides a longitudinal view of resilience reaching back to its introduction in 2021. It provides a holistic assessment of the capacity of people, households, communities and societies to absorb and recover from shocks, built from what people themselves report about their own circumstances and the structures around them.
This report, along with its two companion reports on early warnings and the impact of disaster on resilience, should be used to help policymakers, researchers and civil society focus on building resilience in the places and populations that are most vulnerable. As with every edition of the World Risk Poll, the underlying data is freely available for further research and analysis.
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Key findings
- Globally, societal resilience has risen (from 53 points in 2021 to 66 in 2025) driven by factors like trust in national institutions and perceptions of government care, but with notable declines in high-income countries.
- However, individual resilience has fallen globally (from 46 points in 2021 to 42 in 2025), primarily due to a drop in people's self-perceived ability to protect themselves and their families in a disaster scenario (from 46% to 42%). However, this change in the global average has been driven by a handful of countries with large populations where feelings of agency have weakened.
- Resilience is rising faster in Africa than anywhere else, closing the gap to the rest of the world. This has been driven largely by stronger household resilience in countries including Algeria (up by 13 points), Nigeria (9 points) and Kenya (8 points).
- Many people don't feel cared for by their governments or neighbours, with three in 10 saying their government doesn't care about them at all. This matters, because feeling cared for is linked to measurably higher household resilience.
- Wellbeing is linked to resilience, and their is little difference between the resilience of those with the lowest wellbeing in high and middle income countries. This suggests there is no trickle-down effect for resilience; national wealth does not automatically protect the most vulnerable.
Citation
If you wish to use and reference the World Risk Poll 2026 Report: A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope in your own work, please include the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.60743/yx1k-t541
Example Citation in IEEE Style:
Lloyd's Register Foundation. (2026). World Risk Poll 2026 Report. A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope. Lloyd's Register Foundation. https://doi.org/10.60743/yx1k-t541
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World Risk Poll Report 2026 - A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope
This report focuses on how well-equipped people are to cope with the different risks in their lives, and recover from shocks.
Download World Risk Poll Report 2026 - A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope (PDF, 15.27MB)World Risk Poll Resilience Index
Using data from the latest three World Risk Polls, the newly updated Resilience Index provides a unique data resource for understanding the resilience and vulnerabilities of countries and communities around the world.
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Evidence Library
Explore other publications from the Global Safety Evidence Centre.
World Risk Poll data
Explore the full dataset that underlies this report, including specific data for every country included in the World Risk Poll.
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