Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking
Roughly 50 million people live in forced labour or forced marriage, embedded in global supply chains.
Severity score
53.3
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
The ILO and Walk Free estimate approximately 50 million people in situations of modern slavery, split between forced labour and forced marriage. Forced labour spans agriculture, fishing, construction, domestic work, mining and manufacturing, and is embedded in the supply chains of most consumer goods. Scam compounds in Southeast Asia have added a large new trafficking category, with hundreds of thousands trafficked into online fraud operations.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
35Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
78People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
45Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
45Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
75Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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