Asia Pacific home to top-ranking safe cities

The Asia Pacific region is home to six of the top 10 safest cities in the world, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index 2021, which is sponsored by NEC Corp. Among the overall regional rankings, Singapore took third place (behind Copenhagen and Toronto), followed by Sydney (4th), Tokyo (5th), Wellington (7th), and Hong Kong and Melbourne, which tied for eighth place. The only additional Asia Pacific city to receive a “very high” overall score in the top 20 was Osaka (17th) in Japan, with Taipei (24th), Seoul (25th) and Shanghai (30th) rounding out the top 30.

The index, now in its fourth iteration, ranks 60 cities across 76 indicators covering five categories: digital security, health security, infrastructure security, personal security and environmental security, with the final pillar of environmental security new to the index this year.

“COVID-19 is the first global pandemic to strike humanity since we became a predominantly urban sp