Our crisis support team, now stationed in the U.K., U.S., and Australia, continued to assist clients with a range of crises and incidents throughout 2024. These included threats, active assailants, civil unrest, detentions, political repatriations, medical emergencies, as well as traditional, express, and virtual kidnaps.
In comparison to 2023, the last year saw a 21% reduction in the total number of notifications from our clients, reflecting the nature of global events. Indeed, 2024 was largely characterized by the continuation of conflicts and catastrophes, such as the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the Sudanese civil war. These two major events prompted a large number of our clients to seek our support to mitigate the resulting risks facing their operations, assets, and personnel in 2023, but the past year did not see the emergence of new crises of a similar scale.
Figure 1: Percentage of incidents handled per month in 2024
Source: Alert:24 Operations Centre 2024
Consequently, the past 12 months saw a much more even monthly distribution of incident notifications from clients, with the rise in the autumn heavily influenced by Israel’s decision to deploy ground forces into Lebanon and the subsequent actions between Iran and Israel.
Continuing a trend seen in 2023, the greatest number of incidents took place in Africa, which accounted for over a quarter of the yearly total. The distribution of these incidents was broad, with no single country accounting for a disproportionate share of the incidents across the region. However, all the continent’s incidents took place in Sub-Saharan Africa, with none of the countries bordering the Mediterranean generating a client notification to Alert:24. This reflects the relative stability now seen in the North Africa region, following a decade or more of turbulence that resulted from the Arab Spring in 2010/2011.
Although Africa saw the greatest number of incidents, the Latin America region almost doubled its share of events for clients, rising from 13% to 24% of the total handled. As with Africa, our clients faced crises in a wide range of countries, rather than spikes in a few. Indicative of the rising levels of insecurity in the country, Haiti in the Caribbean was responsible for approximately a fifth of the incidents we recorded for Latin America alone, despite recording no incident notifications in 2023.
In a continuing trend, Europe accounted for a smaller proportion of cases handled in 2024 compared to 2023, dropping from 14% to 8%. This followed a reduction from 31% in 2022, when the continent accounted for a significant proportion of cases predominantly driven by political repatriations from Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. Compounding this is the lower number of total notifications, possibly indicating clients operating in the region are aware of the risks and how to avoid crises.
Political repatriations continued to account for a large number of our incident notifications, though fell by around 6% compared to the year prior. The main drivers for the continuing high numbers of political repatriations were Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon and the lawlessness in Haiti.
Figure 2: Global distribution of incidents handled in 2024
Figure 3: Incident types handled by Alert:24 in 2024
Threats, which were the most regular incident type, made up 26% of the total number of incidents managed by Alert:24 in 2024. As with 2023, threats were reported by our clients from all regions of the world. Our U.S. clients continued to witness the greatest number, with the U.K., Mexico, and South Africa also seeing a notable number of this peril.
Worldwide kidnapping incidents responded to by the team grew from 16% in 2023 to approximately 21% last year. This was driven by a surge of express kidnappings, which predominantly occurred in Latin America, with notifications to our Crisis Support Team from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Cases of this peril in 2024 were also notified from the UAE in the Middle East.
Figure 4: Incident type 2023/2024 comparison
