Keywords

9.1 Introduction

Climate change and its increasing number of manifestations have become a critical concern to societies. Beyond the direct and immediate impacts of catastrophic events, some climate-related occurrences may affect the safety of high-risk industries. The concept of Natech events (Cruz and Suarez-Paba 2019) was introduced to characterize some of these events. Beyond these blatant cases, the interplay of climate change and safety turns out to raise multiple challenges, as illustrated by most authors in this volume. Ignoring the interrelations between the two might lead to critical situations, as illustrated by the Groningen case where a solution was chosen for climate-related reasons, initially overlooking safety issues and then governing safety in ways that would protect this solution in any case (Postmes et al. 2024). Conversely, focusing on safety with limited attention so far to the impact on climate change of high-risk industries leads some of these domains to be threatened in their very “raison d’être” today, like oil and gas or aviation. The evolution of societal expectations and political priorities might lead to open dilemmas regarding these high-risk activities. For oil and gas, for example, despite the impact on climate change, pursuing the current activities makes it possible to fund transitions toward other activities (see the Stavanger case developed by Engen and Morsut 2024). As for nuclear power, the potential safety impacts become secondary to the limited impact on climate change of this industry (see the nuclear power case developed by Tillement 2024).

At more conceptual and methodological levels, new questions emerge when it comes to addressing the interrelations between climate change and safety. Indeed, climate change leads to considering a broader scale, at planet level, that was not part of the systems, scopes and scales considered by safety science. What does safety and safety management mean in a context where existential risks such as those induced by climate change are becoming more likely? Are new approaches, methods or tools needed?

This chapter aims at structuring the different insights on the interplay of safety and climate change coming out of the NeTWork workshop on this topic gathering scholars from different disciplines, countries and working on different high-risk industries.

The first part addresses research and practical challenges raised by the articulation of safety and climate change.

The second part suggests perspectives to reach beyond current safety science limitations in fully embracing the climate change context.

9.2 Research and Practical Challenges

Climate change-related catastrophic events may seem to have a lot in common with industrial accidents. In both cases, one can refer to risks, safety and catastrophic consequences. Yet, articulating safety and climate change requires to reach beyond words and explore the mutual impacts in theory and practice. This section starts by exploring the concepts, methods and scopes used in both domains. Then, considering the new context created by the climate change urgency, it identifies new dilemas and challenges related to the interplay of safety and climate change.

9.2.1 Redefining the Boundaries of “Safety” and High-Risk Industries?

9.2.1.1 Extending the Spectrum and Scale of Consequences

Historically, in the early twentieth century, industrial safety emerged to cope with worker compensation laws that forced employers to provide compensation to their employees for harm related to work (Blake 1963). With time, the scope of safety of high-risk industries evolved to embrace other types of accidents beyond occupational ones, especially harm to people including non-workers and to goods and property. As an example, the International Civil Aviation Organization defines an accident as: “An occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft (…) in which:

  1. (a)

    a person is fatally or seriously injured (…)

  2. (b)

    the aircraft sustains damage or structural failure (…)

  3. (c)

    the aircraft is missing or is completely inaccessible” (ICAO 2016, p. 1).

Interestingly, some systems engineering manuals define safety as also encompassing the ability not to harm the environment (Desroches et al. 2003).Footnote 1 However, these definitions implicitly mean by the “environment” the vicinity of the industrial facility, thereby considering consequences such as toxic fluid leaks or radioactive releases. Otherwise, the simple fact of operating could not be considered safe for industries having a significant impact on the environment and climate change, and a number of industries or activities not considered as high-risk ones today would become so (e.g., agriculture, high-tech).

From a climate change perspective though, considering the consequences of activities on the environment not only locally, but also at the scale of the planet, would make sense. However, reasoning at this global scale, as deemed necessary by Le Coze (2024) and Etienne (2024), has never been part of safety science so far. Existing concepts and methods are not well adapted for it, as claimed by the two authors.

9.2.1.2 Extending the Nature and Likelihood of Hazards

A climate-related phenomenon and its local consequences can jeopardize an industrial facility’s safety management strategies in place. In the example presented by Le Coze (2024), a drop in water level can lead to losing the cooling of a plant. In risk management terms, climate change can induce new types of hazards or significantly increase the likelihood of already considered hazards. A more indirect impact of climate change on the safety of a high-risk facility or activity might be the more likely unavailability of critical infrastructures on which these facilities/activities rely to operate safely, notwithstanding other possible catastrophic consequences of the unavailability of critical infrastructures on people, property and the environment.

Managing safety in a climate change context therefore requires extending the range of hazards considered, not only to new environmental hazards but also to other types of hazards possibly appearing as a result of climate change-related phenomena. It also entails keeping these conditions in mind when analyzing possible risk reduction or safety management measures. This would be a kind of extension of the concept of common mode failures, except that the failures would affect other facilities and services beyond the high-risk system considered.

Although safety science has already started looking into the reliability of critical infrastructures for the severe consequences they can have in case of unavailability, articulating safety and climate change makes it even more necessary to bring the two together. It is worth noting that they are already connected not only through concepts and methods, but also from a societal expectations viewpoint.

9.2.1.3 Safety of Humanity Beyond Safety of High-Risk Systems or Industries

Articulating climate change and safety leads to considering events that can be very different in nature but have similar consequences, especially harm to people, property and the environment. However, when it comes to managing the associated risks or learning to live with the associated uncertainties, it is worth getting into more details to characterize them respectively.

Climate change can induce existential risks as stated by Le Coze (2024), that is risks which concern humanity as a whole, without coming directly from an industrial facility or a given man-made system, but rather from more natural events (in turn possibly resulting from long-lasting dispersed human activities) with a wider reach than industrial risks in terms of their consequences. Although safety and climate change are often seen from a risk perspective, climate change-related risks, conversely to safety risks, cannot be associated with the (dys)functioning of an identifiable system (be it an organization, more or less fragmented, a plant, an industry …). In that sense, it escapes the existing concepts and methods related to risk management that start with the identification of the system under study.

Along the same line, existential risks like the ones possibly induced by climate change escape the very “raison d’être” of risk management approaches, that is the controllability or illusion of controllability of risks. Although the most common governance regime of high-risk industries relies on the demonstration that risks are reduced and maintained at an acceptable level by the “certified” organization, no one pretends or can pretend that climate change-related risks can be controlled by one or a group of humans.

The prism of impacts could seem more appropriate than that of risks to articulate safety and climate change. The concept of safety as the ability not to harm people, property and the environment might seem suitable. However, in safety science, whatever the theoretical approach (e.g., systems safety, HRO, resilience engineering), safety is also defined as a property of a socio-technical system that can be identified. Addressing climate change and the associated existential risks assumes a slightly different meaning of risk and safety than the ones used in safety science. It challenges one of the premises of most of the existing safety management approaches, which is the identification of the socio-technical system causing these hazardous situations.

In that respect, safety could be considered closer to the concept of sustainability, since the latter can be applied to socio-ecological systems.

9.2.1.4 Considering New Time Frames

Another question becomes more obvious when considering climate change: that of time. While the time frame considered is rarely made explicit in safety management approaches, safety management concepts, methods and theories commonly focus on short term. However, within the traditional scope of safety management, issues related to time have already been highlighted. The management of long-lived hazards and the institutional constancy it requires was already underlined by La Porte and Keller at the end of the twentieth century in relation to nuclear waste safe management (La Porte and Keller 1996). The disconnect between “political time” with short mandates and “nuclear time” is illustrated by Tillement (2024) as well as the extent to which it decreases the ability to anticipate plausible futures and generates tensions, more uncertainty and ambiguity.

The issue of the time frame considered and the focus on relatively short-term impacts/views of safety management become even more blatant when it comes to climate change and sustainability. Scientific studies have shown how today’s climate change situation and manifestations result from a (relatively) long history of human industrial activities, illustrating the sometimes very long period between decisions and possible impact on climate. Furthermore, in his review of the principles and definitions of sustainability, Ruggerio (2021) states that any conceptual model intending to define sustainability should “account for intergenerational and intragenerational equity” (p. 9), which naturally involves time frames beyond the short term.

9.2.2 New Dilemas and Challenges

9.2.2.1 Societal Expectations and Governance Challenges

Despite these conceptual and methodological challenges to articulating climate change and safety in high-risk industries (and beyond, as identified earlier), both aspects naturally come together from a societal expectations perspective. Harm to people, property or the environment, whether due to climate change, industrial operations or a combination of both is still perceived as “unacceptable” by civil society.

Nevertheless, current governance structures tend to split the various stakes (e.g., safety and environment) as well as the various industries, even though the dilemmas and societal expectations reach beyond these boundaries. Tensions are common between stakes, for example, nuclear safety and energy security as illustrated by Tillement (2024). Engen and Morsut (2024) illustrate maybe more than a tension between climate change and economy in the case of oil and gas in Norway, since it raises existential questions as to this activity. Although currently recognized as impactful on climate change, it remains essential to sustain the economy and make it possible to support the transition of the region toward more sustainable activities.

With climate change-related events becoming more frequent and more impactful, risk acceptability thresholds as defined in high-risk industries regulatory requirements (e.g., aircraft certification) could be challenged as well. Indeed, these thresholds have historically been defined in comparison with other accepted risks and the risk of “natural” death. Should this latter evolve especially with climate change, acceptable levels of risks due to high-risk industries could be revisited.

9.2.2.2 More Obvious Tensions in Need of Articulation

As described in the previous sections, bringing together climate change and safety in high-risk industries highlights a number of tensions. It also poses theoretical challenges, notably that of articulating the different stakes, scopes, scales or time frames.

As discussed during the NeTWork workshop underlying this work, actions at the individual level may have an impact on global warming. Conversely, understanding what is going on in a specific plant and why requires understanding elements that go far beyond the plant itself (e.g., regulation from different countries if the plant has an international activity; energy supply; and all the other activities to which that of the plant is connected). Although this is not new and was already identified as an articulation challenge within the safety science community, what might be new is that the macro-level would today need to go up to the Earth itself with phenomena that reach beyond the disciplines involved so far in safety science. More generally, the climate change landscape exacerbates the entanglement of stakes and actors, the multiplicity of scales and time frames, the diversity of scopes and interests. As such, it expands the question of bringing together all the elements of a picture that is more blatantly than ever a complex one.

9.3 Perspectives for Safety Science and Scientists

The situation induced by climate change can be seen in different ways, not exclusive from one another and possibly partly interrelated: as a simple extension of already identified safety science challenges; as a deep reconsideration of today’s fundamental assumptions underlying safety science challenging its foundations, concepts and methods; as a new area where safety science could help with some of its concepts, methods and theories; and as an occasion to question the role of scientists in a context where there seems to be a discrepancy between the urgency described by scientific results and the pace of evolution of policies and societies. This section will explore each of these options.

9.3.1 Extending Current Safety and Risk Management Approaches

From a risk management perspective, considering climate change in safety management requires taking into account new hazards, not only environmental ones but also hazards of other natures possibly induced by environmental catastrophes, as well as combinations of events of very different natures resulting from such catastrophes limiting risk mitigation options. Methodologically, it can be seen as an extension of methods such as global risk analysis (Desroches et al. 2016) and of concepts such as common mode failures to the identification of risk reduction measures, whereas it is currently limited to risk analysis.

To extend the safety scope to global scales including existential risks and to conceptualize the interrelations between the historical scale at which industrial risks were addressed (i.e., socio-technical systems) and climate change phenomena (i.e., planet earth), Le Coze (2024) suggests the framework of Post Normal Accidents.

Other articulations are needed as shown in the previous section, especially between stakes due to the entanglement of safety, climate change, economic, political … aspects or between time frames. Field studies (e.g., anthropological or organizational studies) or the HRO theory helps to highlight and understand the interrelations between stakes or time frames. However, they remain to a large extent descriptive approaches and are not predominant or even widely spread in the world of safety science. They are even less present in the world of safety practitioners driven by regulatory frameworks which neither require nor foster these qualitative analyses (Bieder 2022).

Although some conceptual and methodological work is still needed, another issue is that of translating these concepts and methods into practices.

9.3.2 Reconsidering Some of the Fundamentals of Safety Science and Proposing New Approaches

For a huge community of scholars and practitioners, safety is synonymous with good risk management (even though risk management only addresses the domains of the known and knowable, leaving the unknowable apart (Desroches et al. 2003)). One of the premises of risk management and risk science is that risks can be controlled and governed. As illustrated by Postmes et al. (2024), the definition and assessment of risks can be strong instruments of power. For systemic and existential risks, more global in their consequences, but also more diffuse in their origins in the sense that they cannot be associated with a particular system or an identified governance body, the fundamental assumption of risk controllability and governance is challenged. Indeed, they entail all sorts of uncertainties beyond the stochastic one considered in risk management.

Besides conceptual reworking, it would be critical as suggested by Etienne (2024) to challenge safety science’s lenses and focus to put risk management in a wider context that includes many implicit assumptions regarding the overall context. Unveiling all the aspects that safety scientists and practitioners take for granted from an economic, social, political and other standpoints and exploring whether they might be challenged by climate change-induced new conditions would be needed. For example, would insurers still be able to insure for natural events; would rescue services still be able to intervene on a high-risk site after a Natech event …?

From a methodological point of view, Bleicher (2024) suggests exploring other approaches than risk management and traditional governance, such as collective experimentation. According to the author, such approaches allow for more inclusion and openness to surprise. As such, they could be a way to reach beyond the illusion of control.

9.3.3 Climate Change Challenges: An Area Where Safety Science Could Help

Uncertainties, complexities, controversies and crises develop with global warming and its growing number of manifestations worldwide. These phenomena have been studied and addressed by safety science for decades, notably through the development of theories such as HRO, normal accidents and crisis management. Systems thinking, coupling, disaster studies, resilience, governance and management of uncertainty are domains where significant knowledge has been produced by safety science (Perrow 1999; Boin 2008; Dekker 2019; Grote 2009). Concepts, theories, methods and tools and case studies would be worth reviewing through climate change lenses to appreciate what is valid, what is actionable as such, what needs adaptation, and what would better be dropped.

Among the contributions in this volume, Weyer (2024) explores the added value for policymakers of a simulation tool which could “anticipate” the impact of certain decisions, considering distinct behaviors for different social groups and integrating possible nonlinearities in collective reactions.

9.3.4 Questioning the Role of Science and Scientists

Despite the urgency of curbing the greenhouse gas emissions pointed out by scientists since the 1970s (see Meadows et al. 1972), the pace of change in practices is still far from what would be needed to meet the challenge. As such, climate change is an obvious illustration that science may not be the best place from which to change society. Inconvenient truths can remain ignored on purpose when there is no easy way to deal with them.

This observation is a reminder of an issue also clearly identified in safety science, where the long-lasting recognition of the limitations of some safety management approaches or safety governance regimes has not led to any evolution outside of academia. The dilemma for safety scientists working in the social or political sciences is still vivid. Should this community become more prescriptive (as engineering disciplines often are), thereby partly contradicting some of its findings to make things happen?

More inclusive approaches such as that suggested by Bleicher (2024) could be a way for researchers to be more influential or at least engage in a discussion with public decision-makers and representatives of civil society.

9.4 Conclusion

The discussions held during the workshop as well as the previous chapters of this book allowed for identifying mutual impacts of climate change and safety both in theory and practice. Concepts such as uncertainty, risk, accident or disaster are used in both domains, but a closer look at what they encompass leads to highlighting nuances that do not seem to be commonly acknowledged or addressed. Some existing theories and methods could be adapted to address safety in a climate change era, and new lenses might be needed to revisit basic assumptions taken for granted as to the context in which safety is and will be managed. At the same time, the significant research work done in safety management on complexity, uncertainty, disasters and resilience can be a useful base to support reflections on how to live with climate change.

At a more societal level, the interplay of safety and climate change induces new dilemmas in terms of expectations and acceptability. The current governance regimes working in silos and involving distinct actors are challenged. How the dilemmas are currently addressed at different managerial and institutional levels needs further investigation. Some promising approaches suggesting new modes of governance are being experimented, but are still at the stage of research initiatives today.

Finally, this new climate change landscape and the urgency for action poses again with even greater urgency the question of the role of scientists and their influence on society, a question that safety management researchers, especially those coming from the social sciences, have been struggling with for decades.

Articulating safety and climate change raises a wide range of issues in many areas. Although very few are new taken individually, what might be more unprecedented is the obvious entanglement between them.