Climate Change, Global Scales and Safety

The argument of this chapter is that climate change is one change among many which currently affect the operating landscape of safety-critical systems, and that safety research should adapt its lenses to capture these changes. Climate change, which could, perhaps, preferably be described as global warming, should therefore not be considered in isolation but in relation to other changes (e.g., globalization, digitalization). One task for safety research is therefore to identify, to empirically study and to explore the implications of such changes for safety but also to address their theoretical consequences. Following a short presentation of a case study in the chemical industry, the proposition of Post Normal Accident is briefly introduced. It provides analytical lenses to conceptualize change through the notion of global scales shaping new causal regimes in safety, causal regimes expanding coupling and complexity well beyond Perrow’s initial use of the notions in the 1980s.