Safety and Resilience for Navigating Towards Sustainable Development in the Age of Complexity

In the first decades of the new millennium, the world has changed, and it is still changing faster and faster in an unpredictable way. We are in the age of complexity: interdependences, surprises, and uncertainties no longer permit the management of safety with reference to stable conditions. This requires improving the resilience capabilities of the communities, particularly for coping with disasters. United Nations policies underline that the capacity of facing disasters is becoming a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development. This paper presents some reflections on why, in an increasingly complex world exposed to a multiplicity of hazards, it is important to address the problem of disaster risk reduction and resilience in terms of the new paradigm of “intersectoral safety”. Intersectoral safety for disaster risk reduction and resilience is the research topic of the UNESCO Chair of the Università degli Studi di Udine (Italy). The contents of this paper resume what was discussed in a seminar of the Italian network of the UNESCO Chairs, illustrate the theoretical concepts at the basis of the new paradigm of intersectoral safety, and present some applications.