Press Freedom Decline
Journalism is being criminalised in more countries every year.
Severity score
34.7
Limited · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Journalists face record levels of imprisonment and killing, with impunity in the overwhelming majority of cases. Local reporting capacity is collapsing in parallel, which removes the primary source of verified information about many of the other crises in this index.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
14Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
72People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
26Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
2Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
70Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.