New Avetta Research Finds Connecting Risk Strategies Can Reduce Severe Injury Rates and Fatalities

Avetta®, the leader in intelligent work readiness across global supply chains, today released the Avetta Insights and Impact Report 2026. The report offers new analysis on how organisations across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region can improve safety outcomes across increasingly complex global operations. Chiefly, it shows how a strong risk management foundation, greater visibility into supply chains and strategically layering risk management capabilities can improve safety and operational performance, with a 74% improvement in serious injury rates across APAC.

According to Safe Work Australia, 188 workers lost their lives due to work-related injuries in 2024. There were also 146,700 serious workers’ compensation claims involving at least one week of working time lost in 2023-24, equivalent to more than 400 serious claims a day across Australia.

“Supply chains have become increasingly distributed and unpredictable, forcing organisations to navigate risk faster than ever before,” said Arshad Matin, CEO at Avetta. “Our 2026 report confirms that health and safety performance doesn't improve by simply adding individual programs in a vacuum. The organisations seeing the most dramatic results—and building safer, more resilient operations—are those that shift from a siloed approach to a connected, strategic system. They aren’t just managing compliance—they’re cultivating a state of readiness.”

To support more consistent analysis of serious health and safety outcomes across regions, this year’s report also introduces the global severe injury rate (GSIR), a normalised measure designed to address differences in how severe injuries are defined and reported worldwide. GSIR provides additional context alongside fatality rate and serves as a transitional calculation as the industry moves toward more standardised reporting.

That shift is underway with the recent release of ASTM E2920-26, a new global standard for recording and benchmarking priority occupational health and safety-related incidents. Avetta is a key participant in the standard’s development and maintenance and has begun incorporating the framework into its platform to support broader adoption over time.

The report provides the following key takeaways based on three years (2022-2024) of GSIR and fatality rate data:

1. Foundation matters: Organisations that implement core health and safety risk management capabilities—such as prequalification, safety audits, insurance verification, worker management and worksite controls—see significantly lower GSIR and fatality rates. The APAC data showed GSIR and fatality rates improved by 36% and 16%, respectively, after going through Avetta’s insurance verification process. This reinforces that a strong health and safety foundation is essential to protecting workers and maintaining operational readiness.
   
   
2. Visibility matters: Across APAC, broader supply chain risk visibility into sustainability, business and cyber risks improves safety maturity by surfacing exposures that often sit outside traditional health and safety functions. For example, APAC organisations that implemented and continued to improve their ESG and sustainability risk visibility saw, on average, 41% less severe incidents and 37% less fatalities.
   
   
3. Strategy matters: Organisations that take a strategic, systems-based approach by integrating capabilities over time are seeing the strongest results, including up to a 97% improvement in fatality rates globally and a 74% improvement in severe injury rates in APAC. The latter is a significantly higher percentage than any other region—compared to 20% for North America, 20% for Europe and 52% for Latin America. Each capability builds on the last, increasing visibility, strengthening controls and reducing risk more effectively.

Additionally, the report highlights the growing role of AI in helping organisations operationalise the capabilities outlined in these key findings. When grounded in a trusted system, AI enhances visibility by identifying patterns across risk signals and supports more coordinated, strategic action across operations. In this context, AI moves beyond a productivity tool to become a readiness engine, enabling organisations to act on insights with confidence, scale decision-making and maintain visibility that is explainable, auditable and tied to real-world execution.

“What stands out in the data is that meaningful improvements in health and safety performance aren’t driven by individual actions, but by how organisations build and operationalise their overall approach to supply chain risk management,” Matin concluded. “A strong foundation creates consistency, greater visibility brings clarity and a coordinated strategy ensures those elements work together so work can move forward safely, predictably and confidently. When AI is introduced into a system like that, it acts as a force multiplier, turning insight into action at scale.”

To learn more about Avetta, visit http://www.avetta.com/en-au.

About Avetta

Avetta is building the largest global community of hiring clients and suppliers that are Ready to Work. Its unified platform streamlines compliance, prequalification, safety and performance benchmarking in a single, integrated experience. Trusted by over 360,000 businesses across more than 120 countries, Avetta blends AI-driven insights and human expertise to close risk gaps and strengthen supplier reliability so projects start on time, risks are managed proactively and operations scale with certainty.

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