Data sources
Every data feed behind the Kakapo Safety Index — what it measures, how often it updates, and how it feeds the score. This is the source-of-truth list; we publish only sources we actually use.
Quantitative inputs to the score
These primary, public sources are wired directly into Kakapo's scoring pipeline. Each one maps to a live data adapter that pulls fresh figures and feeds them into the 0–100 score and its sub-scores.
| Source | What it measures | Update cadence | Role in the score |
|---|---|---|---|
| US State Department Travel Advisories | Country advisory level 1–4 + risk-category flags (crime, terrorism, civil unrest). | Continuous (per-country, on change) | Civil-stability + personal-safety penalty |
| UK FCDO Foreign Travel Advice | Per-country advice severity, including 'advise against travel' zones. | Continuous (per-country, on change) | Civil-stability + personal-safety penalty |
| UNODC — UN Office on Drugs and Crime | National intentional-homicide rate per 100,000. | Annual | Violent-crime sub-score (homicide → safety curve) |
| World Bank — Worldwide Governance Indicators | Rule of law, political stability, government effectiveness. | Annual | Civil-stability + policing-trust signal |
| WHO Global Health Observatory (GHO) | Health-system capacity (hospital beds, road-traffic mortality, life expectancy). | Periodic (annual / multi-year) | Healthcare + transport sub-scores |
| OpenAQ | Real-time ground-station air-quality (PM2.5, PM10) by coordinates. | Real-time / hourly | Air-quality sub-score |
| USGS Earthquake Catalog | Recent + historical seismic events by location + magnitude. | Real-time | Environmental-hazard signal |
City-level official crime statistics
For the countries below, city safety scores are calibrated against the country's own official police / statistics-agency crime data — per city, not just per country. Where these figures are available they anchor the score directly, so a city's number traces to its government's published crime statistics rather than an estimate.
| Source | Country | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| UK Home Office — data.police.uk | United Kingdom | Street-level violent crime + robbery per city (open API). |
| NSW BOCSAR, ABS & state police | Australia | Recorded violent-offence rates per 100k by city/state. |
| Statistics Canada — Crime Severity Index | Canada | Severity-weighted crime index per Census Metropolitan Area. |
| BKA — Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik (PKS) | Germany | Gewaltkriminalität (violent-crime) Häufigkeitszahl per 100k, per city. |
| National Police Agency (NPA) / e-Stat | Japan | Kyoakuhan (violent-crime) offences per 100k, by prefecture. |
We are extending this city-level layer country by country as each government's data becomes available; countries not yet listed use the country-level inputs above plus editorial calibration.
The synthesis + calibration layer
The raw figures above are combined through a calibrated model. Where a city has high-confidence reference data, hand-verified anchor scores override the formula; elsewhere the model blends the quantitative inputs with a language-model synthesis of the government advisories and reporting below. The full weighting and band logic is documented on the methodology page.
Editorial + verification sources
These sources inform the written guides and the score calibration, and are cited inline on individual guides where relevant:
- National police + interior ministries — local crime statistics + specific scam/pattern advisories.
- National meteorology agencies — AEMET, Met Office, Météo-France, NOAA, JMA — for weather-risk framing.
- Public-health surveillance — US CDC Travel Health + ECDC outbreak + disease bulletins.
- Other government advisories — Canada + Ireland DFA for cross-checking the US + UK framing.
- National tourism boards + transit operators — for official pricing, routes + operator references.
- Local English-language press — for current-pattern reporting on scams, incidents + advisory changes.
What we don't currently use
For transparency: crowd-sourced indices such as Numbeo, the Global Peace Index, and dedicated women's-safety indices are not currently wired into the numeric score. We've evaluated them; they're noted as candidate inputs in our pipeline but are not feeding scores today. When that changes, this page changes with it. We'd rather under-claim our inputs than overstate them.
How this connects to a score
Every city + country guide ends with a Sources block citing the specific advisories + reports behind that page, and carries a visible "last updated" date. The score methodology — sub-scores, bands, weighting, cadence — lives at /about/methodology. To cite a Kakapo score, attribute it to Kakapo (kakapo.travel) and link the live guide so your "last updated" date stays accurate.