The Preparedness Index 2026

How prepared are citizens and societies for an increasingly uncertain world? 

Nations, communities and individual citizens face a widening range of interconnected risks. These include extreme weather, public health emergencies, financial disruption, attacks on critical infrastructure and the consequences of international conflict. 

Strengthening national resilience requires more than the ability to respond once a crisis has occurred. It depends on whether citizens understand the risks, trust the information they receive, recognise their own role and take practical steps to prepare. 

The Verian Preparedness Index provides a new international measure of citizen preparedness across twelve countries. Our index examines:  

• Confidence: whether citizens believe they, their communities and their countries would be able to cope with domestic impacts across five risk scenarios.
• Action: whether households have taken practical steps to prepare. 
• Self-sufficiency: how long people believe they could manage without essential services. 
• Trust: where people would turn for information during a crisis. 
• Responsibility: belief about how responsibility should be shared between government and ordinary citizens.   

Together, these dimensions produce an overall score out of 100. The Index reveals where citizen preparedness is strongest, where it needs to be strengthened and how policymakers can build greater resilience across the individual, community and national levels.