Safety in Today's World, New Challenges?

A brief 'back-to basics' will serve as a 'warm-up' in which the fundamentals of safety science will be reviewed, such as what is safety, hazards and risks, how to measure safety, safety and reliability, safety and security, safety and quality, safety in other fields than in technology and engineering. To be motivated for efforts to establish safety, wisdom is required by experience and insight, because usually achieving a result needs less time and energy if safety measures are neglected. However, risk is a stochastic quantity and if the possibility of mishap is inherently present accident/misfortune will turn-up one time and may destroy much more than the achievement would have created in a positive sense. This gives the reason why in safe design, engineering and operation of technical constructions a 'symbiosis' of technical and human/ organizational sciences is very necessary but not simple to realize. It is a challenge to create a good safety culture as it reflects in a good safety climate. In fact it has to start in education and engineers should be well aware of the mechanisms involved. The paper will present an impression of the many implications of all this in education, engineering and society and show similarities with environmental protection and sustainability. Safety pays, but how can we achieve it and how can we be sure? It requires risk control, risk management and risk governance which aim for the same but at increasing levels of organizational complexity. It all needs means, tools, norms and values, and regulation. Auditing and inspection and feedback mechanisms are crucial. System analysis, conceptual and structured thinking are key. In technology it also means knowledge of material properties and test methods. In engineering it means standards, codes and work according to best practices. It is struggling against efficiency and cost measures. What are the present trends in these times of economical pressures and the emerging sustainability goals? What are new priorities, where do we have to develop and do research? What are new aspects to the field such as resilience engineering and the application of Bayesian Belief Networks and Influence Diagrams and other supporting techniques for decision making? A number of developments in which promising progress is made will be reviewed.