One in three Bangladeshi doesn’t know what is top risk in their life: Report

One in three Bangladeshi does not know what the top risk in their life is according to a report released by Lloyd's Register Foundation, a global safety charity, and the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think tank.

The second Safety Perceptions Index 2023 (SPI) report released on Thursday,  which provides a comprehensive measure of global perceptions of safety, said 36% of Bangladeshis answered that they didn't know what the top risk in their lives was.

With a score of 0.267, Bangladesh ranked 79th most risk impacted country among 121 others.

In the first edition of the report published last year, Bangladesh ranked 61st out of 141 countries. 

In the 2022 edition, Bangladesh scored 0.19, where a score of 0 represents no risk and no concerns about safety. 

In South Asia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal ranked above Bangladesh at 29th, 57th, and 73rd positions, respectively. India ranked 97th with a score of 0.320.

Afghanistan is 112th with 0.397 points, worst on the index in the region. "War and terrorism" is the top risk in Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan recorded the best overall score, while Mali recorded the worst overall score. 

Mali is currently suffering from a violent internal conflict, has high rates of terrorism, and saw its government overthrown in successful coups in both 2020 and 2021.

The report is based on two iterations of the Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, the first conducted in 2019 and the second in 2021, and provides commentary, trends, and insights into these two sets of data.

The survey was completed prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has significantly stressed global food supply chains.

The SPI measures the levels of worry, likelihood, and experience of risk across five domains: health, personal, violence, environment, and the workplace.

Rise in 'ambiguous risk'

The 2023 SPI report finds a rise in 'ambiguous risk'. This refers to people's feeling that they are at risk, but are unsure of what that is. 
Between 2019 and 2021, the largest changes in response rates were for those saying that no risk existed in their lives, which fell by half, and those saying they did not know what their greatest risk was, which nearly doubled.

"The Safety Perceptions Index 2023 report digs deeper into the World Risk Poll data to provide us with valuable insights into how perceptions of safety differ across countries, and how the various aspects of risk are connected," said Sarah Cumbers, director of Evidence & Insight at Lloyd's Register Foundation. 

"The report will be useful in the decades ahead as it will provide insight into the shifts in perception that might be associated with any future pandemics or other global shocks, and how to manage those changes."