Enhancing safety : the challenge of foresight : proceedings of the 53rd ESReDA seminar hosted by the European Commission Joint Research Centre 14-15 November 2017, Ispra, Italy

We live in a world where advancement in technology coupled with human's creative and innovative mind has led to the design of safer and better performing infrastructures (nuclear power plants, chemical process plants, high speed trains, spaceplanes, etc.), which are needed for a modern society. However, due to the interconnected socio-economic and technological landscape that is rapidly evolving, safety continues to have many new challenges (known unknowns, unknown unknowns) that add onto changed variants of the old challenges (e.g. modified known unknowns). Additionally, governance and legislation can be slow to catch up with this dynamic pace of change. At times, overregulation can occur, resulting in a significant resource investment towards compliance for existing infrastructure operators or for aspiring start-ups that would like to enter the market, but end up struggling or even abandoning the sector. Inspired by this background, the European Safety and Reliability Data Association's Foresight in Safety Project Group prepared the 53rd ESReDA seminar with a purpose to launch an open dialogue with stakeholders in the safety arena. Thus, by providing an open forum where experiences in foresight in safety approaches from different sectors could be shared, cross-fertilisation of ideas, such as how foresight could be mainstreamed into safety practice in a more consistent manner, could be discussed.