Climate Change and Safety in High-Risk Industries

Corinne Bieder is Head of the Safety management research program at ENAC (the French Civil Aviation University). She has worked and conducted research in safety management in a variety of high-risk industries for many years. She has published a number of papers and books on safety management and is a member of the international NeTWork think tank addressing safety from a multidisciplinary perspective, as well as of the strategic analysis group FonCSI (Foundation for an Industrial Safety Culture).

Gudela Grote is Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, ETH Zürich. Her research addresses questions of organizational safety management and socio-technical system design, on which she has also consulted with companies such as Swiss Re and the Swiss railways.  She has been Associated Editor of Safety Science and currently is member of the Swiss National Research Council and thescientific advisory board of the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Johannes Weyer holds Senior Professorship in Sustainable Mobility at the Department of Social Sciences of TU Dortmund. His areas of research are human-machine interaction, governance of complex systems, agent-based modeling and sustainable transformations, especially in the area of urban transportation. He is member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering.

This open access book directs attention to the safety implications of disruptive, sustainability-driven changes in sociotechnical systems resulting from climate-change considerations in high-risk industries. It addresses not only the dismantling of currently prevalent systems and structures and the achievement of a stable future state but also the management of processes for establishing new practices in a safe and reliable manner without undue interruption of important functions and services.

Leading scholars from various fields of research have contributed to this brief by analyzing case studies as well as through conceptual and methodological work. They propose strategies for coping with new kinds of risk at local and organizational levels. The oil and gas and nuclear industries are two cases investigated here. They present a challenging mixture of continuity and disruption and require strategies for coping with safety and sustainability issues at the same time. Innovativemethods such as real-world experimentation and computer-based simulation are discussed as means of investigating the issues at stake.

Climate Change and Safety in High-Risk Industries brings together critical appraisals of the challenges that will be faced by industry, regulatory bodies and decision-makers in coming decades. It analyzes whether safety and sustainability are accurately thought of as competing imperatives or, rather, offer possibilities for a more cooperative approach to the necessary adaptations in our modes of production and consumption.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Climate change, global scales and safety.- Chapter 3. On the future of industrial safety research.- Chapter 4. The experimental perspective to address critical infrastructure security issues in times of crisis.- Chapter 5. Safe transitions in complex systems.- Chapter 6. Climate risk at local level.- Chapter 7. The Groningen gas field: The role of science in a slow-onset disaster.- Chapter 8. "Old is gold?".- Chapter 9. Articulating safety and climate change.