Safety and risk management

Societies in industrialized countries like France are based on science and technology. They are increasingly complex systems; their component parts are highly interconnected: a transport strike can paralyze the whole country, a power failure has unexpected repercussions (blocked elevators, lack of traffic lights, etc.), their systemic analysis has become essential. Today's modern societies are open spaces where communication takes on extreme importance, often leading to anxiety and hasty judgments. Risk is poorly perceived, whether it's natural or linked to human activity, particularly industrial activity. It's a largely subjective notion.

For a long time, the French have accepted real hecatombes on their roads, where some 3,000 to 5,000 people are still killed every year (10 a day!), but they find it hard to accept a workplace accident, even if it turns out that the employer has taken many precautions in good conscience. The industrial tool is less and less tolerated, even though it is the very basis of the host country's wealth. But what can we say about an accident like the one that destroyed the AZF plant in Toulouse on September 21, 2001, causing some thirty deaths and considerable damage? What are we to make of the tragedy in Bhopal, India, which occurred during the night of December 2 to 3, 1994, when we will never know whether the number of victims was 5,000 or 20,000, or even more?

The notion of "sustainable development" has been gaining ground since the Second World War. It rests on three pillars: economic, without which no human enterprise can survive; environmental, because we need to protect our planet; and societal, because human activity must take into account the needs of society and the opinions of the individuals who make it up.

Risk management is an essential component of sustainable development: on the scale of a nation, a community, a company, a factory, an individual. The advent of digital technology, whether in the workplace or in everyday life, the explosion of Internet communication and, in recent years, acts of terrorism, have made it necessary to adopt a new approach to risk management.

Risk management is the implementation of all organizational and technical measures aimed at reducing the probability of occurrence or mitigating the severity of a risk. In our modern, industrialized societies, governed by increasingly complex systems, risk - whether technological, individual, financial, professional or malicious - is increasingly misperceived. Having become an essential component of sustainable development and corporate management, risk management requires us to understand and explain phenomena that call on increasingly acute knowledge of the exact sciences, sometimes described as "hard"...