Avetta Report Links Integrated Risk Strategy to 74% Drop in APAC Injuries

Avetta has released its Insights and Impact Report 2026, finding that organisations across the Asia-Pacific region taking a strategic, systems-based approach to integrating supply chain risk management capabilities over time achieved up to a 97 percent improvement in fatality rates globally and a 74 percent improvement in severe injury rates in APAC, a significantly higher improvement than any other region compared with 20 percent for North America, 20 percent for Europe and 52 percent for Latin America. The report draws on three years of global severe injury rate and fatality rate data from 2022 to 2024, finding that 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, with APAC organisations that implemented and continued improving their ESG and sustainability risk visibility seeing on average 41 percent fewer severe incidents and 37 percent fewer fatalities. Arshad Matin, Chief Executive Officer at Avetta, said health and safety performance does not improve by simply adding individual programmes in a vacuum, and that organisations seeing the most dramatic results are those that shift from a siloed approach to a connected, strategic system, cultivating a state of readiness rather than merely managing compliance.

 

The ESG and Sustainability Risk Visibility Connection

 

The report's finding that ESG and sustainability risk visibility correlates with substantially improved safety outcomes provides empirical evidence for a connection between sustainability governance maturity and operational safety performance that extends beyond the conventional treatment of ESG and occupational health and safety as separate management functions. The 41 percent reduction in severe incidents and 37 percent reduction in fatalities associated with improved ESG and sustainability risk visibility suggests that organisations investing in broader sustainability risk management infrastructure develop organisational capabilities, data systems and risk awareness culture that translate directly into better identification and management of workplace safety hazards, even though the two risk domains are conventionally managed by different teams using different frameworks. This finding has practical implications for how companies structure their risk management functions, suggesting that integrating rather than siloing ESG, sustainability and occupational health and safety risk management may deliver safety performance benefits beyond what dedicated safety programmes alone can achieve.

Safe Work Australia data cited in the report shows 188 workers lost their lives due to work-related injuries in 2024, with 146,700 serious workers' compensation claims involving at least one week of lost working time in 2023-24, equivalent to more than 400 serious claims daily across Australia, providing the scale of human cost that underpins the commercial and ethical urgency of the safety performance improvements the report documents. For organisations operating complex, distributed supply chains across the Asia-Pacific region, the scale of this occupational safety burden creates substantial moral, legal and commercial imperative for adopting the integrated risk management approaches that the report's data demonstrates deliver measurably better outcomes.

 

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The Foundation, Visibility and Strategy Framework

 

The report's three-part framework identifies foundational risk management capabilities including prequalification, safety audits, insurance verification, worker management and worksite controls as delivering measurable safety improvement on their own, with APAC data showing GSIR and fatality rates improved by 36 percent and 16 percent respectively after organisations completed Avetta's insurance verification process. This foundational layer represents the baseline risk management infrastructure that the report identifies as essential before broader visibility and strategic integration can deliver their full safety performance benefit, establishing a sequenced model for how organisations should build their supply chain risk management capability over time. The visibility layer, encompassing broader exposure to sustainability, business and cyber risks beyond traditional health and safety metrics, provides the expanded risk awareness that surfaces hazards and vulnerabilities that siloed safety-only risk management would miss, explaining the substantial additional improvement associated with ESG and sustainability risk visibility integration.

The strategic integration layer, where organisations combine foundational capabilities and expanded visibility into a coordinated systems-based approach rather than implementing individual programmes independently, delivers the most dramatic safety performance improvements documented in the report, with each capability building on the last to increase visibility, strengthen controls and reduce risk more effectively than any single intervention could achieve alone. The introduction of the Global Severe Injury Rate as a normalised measure addressing differences in how severe injuries are defined and reported worldwide provides methodological infrastructure for more consistent cross-regional safety performance comparison, supporting the broader industry movement toward standardised reporting reflected in the recent release of ASTM E2920-26, a new global standard for recording and benchmarking priority occupational health and safety incidents that Avetta has been a key participant in developing.

 

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AI as a Readiness Engine for Risk Management

 

The report highlights the growing role of artificial intelligence in helping organisations operationalise the integrated risk management capabilities that drive the documented safety performance improvements, with AI enhancing visibility by identifying patterns across risk signals and supporting more coordinated, strategic action across operations when grounded in a trusted system. Matin described AI as moving beyond a productivity tool to become a readiness engine in this context, enabling organisations to act on insights with confidence, scale decision-making and maintain visibility that is explainable, auditable and tied to real-world execution, a framing that positions AI's value in risk management as fundamentally about strengthening the connective tissue between data, decision-making and operational action rather than simply automating existing manual processes. This AI application within supply chain risk management reflects the broader trend of artificial intelligence augmenting human judgement in complex risk environments where the volume and diversity of risk signals across distributed global supply chains exceeds what manual analysis can effectively process.

 

Outlook for Integrated Supply Chain Risk Management

 

The Avetta report's empirical demonstration that integrated, systems-based risk management delivers dramatically better safety outcomes than siloed individual programmes provides a compelling evidence base for organisations evaluating how to structure their supply chain risk management investment priorities, particularly given the substantial regional variation showing APAC's 74 percent improvement substantially exceeding the gains achieved in North America and Europe. Whether organisations across other regions can replicate APAC's strong results by adopting comparable integrated foundation, visibility and strategy approaches will be an important test of whether the framework's principles generalise across different regulatory, cultural and supply chain contexts or whether APAC's outsized improvement reflects region-specific factors not easily replicated elsewhere. Continued development and adoption of standardised global severe injury rate measurement and the ASTM E2920-26 standard would support more rigorous cross-regional benchmarking that could validate and refine the integrated risk management framework's applicability across the full diversity of global supply chain operating environments.

 

Source: BUSINESS WIRE