Is there such a thing as a “safety risk”?
- By Gareth Byatt
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- 08 Feb, 2018
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Food for thought from Rod Farrar (Principal Consultant, Paladin Risk)
Is there such a thing as a “safety risk”? Rod Farrar, Principal Consultant at Paladin Risk, discusses in a blog post on his website how “a risk is a risk”, and that it will often have multiple impacts. If there is a safety impact, it may be the most important one, of course: safety is a critical factor in many industries. Managing safety is good business, and many risks have safety implications that need to be understood and managed.
Here's my viewpoint:
I am an adherent to thinking about risk in an integrated and holistic way.
Also, we should remember that many techniques to manage safety have contributed to broader risk practices and techniques that can be, and are, applied to all sorts of situations – such as the Bow Tie Analysis, Scenario Analysis and good practices in industrial Operational Risk Management.
There is clearly a lot of synergy in how we can manage risks with safety impacts and how we manage risks that do not have safety impacts.
We held very interesting in-person discussions about how my Urban 2.0 framework and system can be used by cities and towns around the world, and also the release of the UNDRR Global Assessment Report, Special Report 2024, which I was delighted to contribute towards.
The municipality of Bordeaux is continuing to pursue some excellent work in urban resilience, which I will be profiling in due course...
Almost half of Small Island Developing States' (SIDS) populations reside in urban areas. Research into urban resilience and urban planning tends to focus on cities in large nations, and only a relatively small amount of specific research on SIDS cities currently exists. However, much of the general urban resilience research is applicable to SIDS, as long as context is considered.
This paper focuses on ways to implement measures that will foster resilient and dynamic cities in SIDS. Ensuring good policy action to build, maintain and continuously improve these cities is key to achieving sustainable development and resilient prosperity as set out in the Outcome Document of the Fourth International Conference for Small Island Developing States (SIDS4).
With growing challenges like climate change, debt burdens, and dwindling resources, they desperately need an actionable, doable, and ambitious roadmap for the next decade. 2024 is an important year for SIDS, with the SIDS4 conferencetaking place in May.
You can access details about the Forum on the Island Innovation website, here.
You can read edition #1 here. This first edition is an introduction to our work, containing a summary of some of the work we are undertaking, links to case studies and interviews with people about different aspects of avoiding disasters.
We held a very interesting in-person round table discussion with citizens about how disasters can be avoided.
The municipality of Bordeaux is pursuing some excellent resilience work, which I will be profiling in due course...
We reviewed approaches being taken to prevent hazards from turning into disasters, including examples and how innovation is helping countries, cities and communities prevent adverse fallouts from hazard events.
You can access the webinar and download all presentations here.
The December 2022 edition, which covers a wide variety of infrastructure-related topics, is available here...