UAE residents are more worried about road safety than the risk of unemployment, serious illness or crime, a major poll has revealed.
Twenty-eight per cent of the 1,000 surveyed for the World Risk Poll 2024, from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation global safety charity, cited road accidents as their biggest safety issue.
Economic risks, such as job losses, concerned 13 per cent of respondents, while major health issues were cited by eight per cent. Another five per cent were worried about crime or violence. Less serious health concerns such as exhaustion or a fall made four per cent anxious.
The survey's findings – based on nearly 147,000 interviews in 142 countries by the polling firm Gallup – was released on Friday in a report, What the world worries about: global perceptions and experiences of risk and harm.
Road safety
Despite significant improvements in UAE accident statistics, residents still find road safety the most concerning issue.
“Driving is still erratic here. It’s the lack of road culture,” said Thomas Edelmann, managing director of Road Safety UAE. He described road safety as “a daily concern” in the country.
“I’m not surprised people are concerned … more needs to be done,” he added. “On every single trip, you have to watch your back. There are multiple situations where drivers show erratic behaviour without any respect for others.”
Mr Edelmann noted that the number of road accident deaths fell two-thirds to 352 in 2023 from 1,072 in 2008.
“A lot of credit has to go to the authorities,” he said. “The rules have been improved … the road infrastructure has expanded dramatically over the years. Data sources out there claim that the UAE has one of the best, if not absolutely the best, infrastructure in the world.
“The government can only do so much. They can only give us the proper laws, the proper roads, the enforcement, the proper infrastructure, but people behind the wheel, motorists, pedestrians, everyone who uses the roads has to contribute. They have to display a caring attitude and work with each other.”
Road accidents topped the poll globally at 16 per cent, with 76 per cent of adults expressing concern about being seriously hurt in a road accident. Crime or violence was named by 13 per cent, followed by a personal health condition at 11 per cent, the economy at seven per cent and climate change or severe weather events at six per cent.
“Since the World Risk Poll began in 2019, people around the world have named road-related accidents as the greatest risk to their safety every time,” Nancy Hey, director of evidence and insight at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said in a statement. “Even amid major global upheavals, including the Covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions and economic and cost-of-living crises, people continue to feel most threatened by risk from everyday transportation.”
The World Risk Poll found the highest proportion of people who had suffered serious harm in a road accident was in South Asia, at 16 per cent, with South-east Asia second, at 12 per cent.
Little concern over climate change
In the UAE, the poll found that 38 per cent of residents – the third-highest figure in the world – are unconcerned about climate change, despite the country experiencing some of the world’s hottest temperatures.
In several other Middle Eastern countries substantial minorities said climate change was not a threat, including in Saudi Arabia (46 per cent, the highest figure in the world), Israel (the fourth-highest figure globally, at 36 per cent), Iraq (fifth, at 33 per cent), Bahrain (seventh, at 30 per cent) and Jordan (eighth, at 28 per cent).
Prof Michael Mason, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, said that many people in Gulf states may be unconcerned about climate change because these “relatively well-off” nations could” insulate their populations … from the adverse effects of climate change”.
“It could be there's an awareness there, but there's a confidence in the government to protect them,” he said. The heavy urbanisation in the Gulf could be another factor, because many effects of climate change are felt by farmers practising rain-fuelled agriculture, according to Prof Mason.
In some Arab nations there are “more immediate, even existential threats” that he said would tend to crowd out concern about climate change. There is likely to be a generational divide, Prof Mason said, with younger people in the region probably more concerned than older generations about climate change.
In a 2022 report, Greenpeace Research Laboratories, based at the University of Exeter in the UK, warned that the Middle East and North Africa region was warming twice as fast as the world as a whole, with average temperatures rising by about 0.4C per decade. Previous research has indicated that in the Middle East, concern about climate change “isn’t as high” as in some other regions, said Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental psychology at the University of Bath in the UK.
“It could be they have strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo and not moving away from fossil fuels,” she added. Work that Prof Whitmarsh has been involved with found that experiencing flooding – which is becoming more common because of global warming – did not make people more worried about climate change. “It was the media that had the bigger impact. It was mediated information rather than their direct experience,” she said, adding that government inaction on global warming also increased “climate anxiety”.
