A resilient life
From alert to agency
The first and only global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people's safety.
Nationally representative, and covering places with little or no official data on safety and risk. The data are free for governments, regulators, researchers and civil society to use. The Poll will be repeated in 2027 and 2029.
Three reports on resilience and disasters from the 2025 World Risk Poll.
A resilient life: How wellbeing shapes the capacity to cope
How resilience is distributed across the world, what strengthens it and where it is thinnest.
From alert to agency: What turns warnings into action?
Who disasters affect, whether those people were warned, and whether the warning changed what they could do.
After the storm: How disasters reshape resilience and trust
What a disaster does to the places it strikes, followed across successive waves of the Poll.
A resilient life.
One score from 0 to 100, built from four levels of resilience.
Can I protect myself?
Perceived agency in a disaster, education and the sense that one can cope.
Is my home ready?
Financial resilience, a household disaster plan and access to communications.
Will my neighbours help?
Perceptions of local support and of neighbours caring about one another.
Will institutions hold?
Trust in national institutions and whether government is felt to care.
Measured in 2021, 2023 and 2025, among the same respondents who answer Gallup's wellbeing questions. That lets the link between a good life and a resilient one be examined directly.
Global resilience is stable at 57. Underneath, individual resilience keeps falling as societal resilience climbs.
Wealth buys individual resilience. It does not buy societal resilience.
High-income countries lead on individual resilience by 15 points over upper-middle-income countries, and score nearly twice as high as lower-middle- and low-income countries.
On societal resilience they come last of all income groups, at 57. The United States ranks second of 139 countries on the individual and household dimensions, and 130th on societal.
Resilience is rising faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world.
These regions still have among the lowest scores globally, so the gains close a gap rather than open a lead. Rising internet access is one factor: up 17 points in Northern Africa since 2019, and 12 points each in Central/Western and Southern Africa.
as the circle
widens
Each ring is one level of the Resilience Index, and its thickness is the gap between adults who are thriving and adults who are suffering. That gap runs to 26 points at the individual level and closes to nothing at the societal one.
A resilient life and a good life.
A better-rated life is a more resilient one, up to a point.
People classified as thriving score 63 on the Resilience Index, against 56 among those struggling and 47 among those suffering. The gap is at least 10 points in every income group.
At the individual level, adults who are thriving score twice as high as those suffering: 52 against 26. The link weakens at the community level and disappears at the societal level.
The gains flatten above a life rating of 7 out of 10. Moving from a good life to an exceptional one adds little further resilience.
There is no trickle-down effect for resilience. National wealth does not protect people with low wellbeing.
Among adults who rate their present life 0, 1 or 2, resilience sits between 43 and 50 in every income group. At the bottom of the ladder, living in a wealthy country makes little difference.
The gap opens as lives improve. By a rating of 9, high-income countries score 20 points above low-income countries.
Above 7 the gains flatten. In three of four income groups, people rating their life 10 are slightly less resilient than those rating it 9.
Perceptions of care.
Most people feel little or no care from their governments or their neighbours.
Every time the Poll has asked, people have been more likely to say their government does not care about them at all than that it cares a lot. In 97 countries that gap is at least 10 points; the reverse is true in 20.
Perceived care is U-shaped by national income. The least and most affluent countries share a symptom, not a cause.
Almost half of adults in low-income (44%) and high-income (45%) countries feel no care at all from government, against roughly one in four in lower-middle- (25%) and upper-middle-income (24%) countries.
Government care and community care are not substitutes. Weak institutions are not offset by strong informal networks: at the national level the two deficits tend to coincide (r = 0.57).
What the resilience findings ask of policymakers.
- 1Reduce suffering first. Resilience gains are steepest at the bottom of the wellbeing distribution. Much of what shapes both is delivered locally: housing, transport, green space, social services and emergency preparedness.
- 2Target the most vulnerable everywhere. Among people with the lowest wellbeing, resilience differs little between high- and middle-income countries. Support is as necessary in wealthy countries as in lower-income ones.
- 3Build at more than one level. In lower-income countries strong community structures partly offset weaker individual resilience. Education and a sense of agency raise it at the individual level.
- 4Treat feeling cared for as infrastructure. Fewer than one in four adults believe their government or neighbours care a lot. Local government, charities and local businesses are best placed to change that.
- 5Match the response to the cause. One resilience policy will not fit every country. Measures need to address what drives low resilience in each society, at whichever level it sits.
From alert to agency.
One in five adults has been impacted by a disaster in the past five years, and impact follows vulnerability.
Within low-income countries the burden falls further on the most vulnerable: 37% of adults with primary education or less report being impacted, against 20% with higher education. The 2025 wording asks about being impacted, a higher bar than experiencing a disaster, so the 20% is not a fall from the 30% recorded in 2023.
Early warnings.
Four in five of those impacted were warned. The warning gap follows the income gap.
Good progress for the UN Early Warnings for All initiative, which commits the world to universal coverage by the end of 2027. The 80% is not directly comparable with 70% in 2023, because the 2025 Poll asked about eight channels rather than four.
Digital and broadcast channels reach furthest. Multiple warnings are the norm, not the exception.
Only 11% received exactly one warning and 15% received six or more, mostly for slower-onset hazards. SMS outranks WhatsApp for every hazard type, likely because it needs no internet connection.
From warning to action.
Being warned and being able to act are different things.
The ability to act splits more sharply by income than coverage does. High coverage does not guarantee response: more than nine in ten adults impacted by a sandstorm were warned, yet only around half of them could act. Adults warned and able to act score 68 on the Resilience Index, 16 points above those warned who could not.
Three is the magic number. Each of the first three channels adds substantially to the likelihood of acting.
The second and third channel do the lifting. Beyond three, each extra channel adds four to eight points to the share able to act, and resilience barely moves, from 58 to 60. Redundancy raises the chance a message arrives; repetition across channels raises the chance it is believed.
Warnings work best alongside preparedness. Warning infrastructure alone does not produce action.
Agency is the belief that you can protect yourself and your family in a disaster. A household plan is one known to everyone in the home over the age of 10.
The two compound. Together they triple the share able to act compared with having neither. Both sit inside the individual and household dimensions of the Resilience Index, which is where the two reports meet.
Much of the technology needed to close the warning gap already exists.
Expanding SMS-based warnings is the single largest opportunity to close the coverage gap. Phone ownership is not the same as reliable network coverage, but it is a clear place to start.
What the early warnings findings ask of policymakers.
- 1Start with low-income countries. They face the highest disaster impact, the lowest coverage, the lowest ability to act and no measurable resilience gain from having lived through a disaster.
- 2Target the gaps, not the average. Prioritise the geographies where low coverage and high exposure overlap, particularly across Africa and parts of Asia.
- 3Build towards at least three warning channels. Redundancy raises the chance a message arrives; repetition across channels raises the chance it is believed.
- 4Use the phones people already own. SMS is the clearest route to the 170 million unwarned people who have a mobile.
- 5Pair warnings with preparedness. Household plans and personal agency lift the share able to act from 27% to 83%.
- 6Judge systems on action, not on reach. A coverage figure records that a warning was sent. The share able to act records whether it worked.
Türkiye:
two earthquakes
in nine hours.
Where the earthquakes struck, resilience fell. Central East Anatolia lost 17 points while the Mediterranean region and the rest of Türkiye each rose one. Across the two earthquake regions, outlined, the gap with the rest of the country was about four points.
Is the national government well prepared for a disaster?
A 30-point fall where the earthquakes struck, twice the fall in the rest of the country.
Confidence in national government
Confidence came back. Belief that the government is ready for the next one did not.
Slides
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