Peacefulness Around the World Has Deteriorated says Global Peace Index 2020
Peace levels around the world have deteriorated over the past year, with the average country score dropping by 0.34 percent, according to the Global Peace Index 2020, an annual report published on Wednesday.
Afghanistan was named the least peaceful country for the second year in a row, according to the index, followed by Syria and Iraq. At the other end of the rankings, Iceland was named as the most peaceful country. Iceland has ranked first every year since 2008. New Zealand, Austria, Portugal, and Denmark also join Iceland at the top of the list.
The report, Global Peace Index 2020: Measuring Peace in a Complex World, was written by the Institute for Economics & Peace, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank, and published on visionofhumanity.org.
The organization uses 23 qualitative and quantitative indictors to measure the state of peace across three domains: the level of Societal Safety and Security, the extent of Ongoing Domestic and International Conflict, and the degree of Militarization.
This is the ninth year out of twelve years that the global peacefulness score has fallen. “Peacefulness has declined 2.5 percent since 2008,” reads the report. While many older conflicts have started to subside, new tensions have arose as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Different regions have also experienced different trends. The report points out that North America has seen improvements across all three indictors, while the Caribbean, Central America, and South America have recorded the largest slides towards conflict and militarization.
Another key finding from the report is that terrorism and internal conflict have contributed the most towards the falling level of peacefulness across the globe.
As climate change continues to pose a unmitigated risk to humanity, and communities increasingly must compete for scarce resources, the Institute for Economics & Peace included a special focus on a new report called the Ecological Threat Register (ETR).