Learning together for a safer world

We are in a significant period of global change: technologically, economically, socially, and environmentally. Such periods of transition come and go; our colleagues at Lloyd’s Register have been living through them for over 250 years.

From this heritage, we know that when the world is uncertain, we need to find our bearings, be sure of our course, and build on what we already know, so we can navigate safely. And so, fundamental to the Foundation’s charitable mission is the belief that decisions that impact on the safety of life and property should be informed by the best available evidence.

While the journey from evidence to impact is now far quicker than it was in previous centuries (the 200-year lag in implementing a cure for scurvy providing a classic example), even in healthcare it still takes an average of 17 years for evidence to be put into action.

With the Global Safety Evidence Centre, we want to accelerate that pathway to improve safety and reduce harm by:

• identifying and understanding safety challenges and solutions as close to the point of need as possible, and;
• getting safe, effective and affordable solutions happening where they can make the biggest difference as quickly as possible.

Growing the global safety evidence base

Evidence is critical to improving safety. By evidence, in essence we mean learning: having the time, space and methods to notice, review, think and reflect to inform action. It’s learning of different types, by and from everyone involved with a decision-making and -implementing process. Such learning is essential to innovation and progress.

‘Global safety evidence’, then, is learning about:

• the scale and nature of global safety challenges, including as assessed by our World Risk Poll, and;
• ‘what works’ to address these safety challenges.

Often this evidence does not yet exist, or is not easily accessible to those who need to use it. 

And yet, we know from our early research that there is a lot that is known, both from research and professional expertise, and that accumulating this knowledge is a global effort. This puts us in a good place to make a big impact on global safety challenges, and we should be confident of our ability to do so because there is a long history of people doing so in the past.

The Global Safety Evidence Centre

We are investing £15 million over 10 years to establish the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Global Safety Evidence Centre. By doing so, we aim to create a learning system for safety.

The Centre will collate, create and communicate the best available safety evidence from the Foundation, our partners and other sources. It will work with partners to identify and fill gaps in the evidence, and to use that evidence for action to improve safety outcomes.

We will develop evidence relating to four common global challenges – the changing global workforce, new technologies, adapting to climate change, and decarbonisation – and apply them in the Foundation’s strategic priority areas: safer maritime systems, safer sustainable infrastructure, and skilled people for safer engineering.

Our intention is to create knowledge that is robust, relevant and clear, and that is easy to find and use with confidence. We will accelerate the pathway from safety issue identification, through safety innovation, to widespread adoption and use. And we will support innovations that are safe, effective, affordable, cost effective and used.

We’d like you to – safety practitioners, policymakers, and affected local communities around the world – to come with us on this journey, to learn with us and to use that knowledge where you can to improve the safety of life and property.

What now?

Initially, the Centre will focus on two core evidence programmes:

1. Safe Work, particularly in ‘high hazard’ industries, building the evidence base in support of Sustainable Development Goal 8.8. This will build on insights from our World Risk Poll, enabling effective action to reduce the one in five (18%) of the global workforce who report experiencing harm at work in the past two years. Despite this high incidence, the World Risk Poll shows that workplace harm isn’t high on most people’s list of safety worries, suggesting conscious and consistent attention is required to address it. The first two outputs from this evidence programme – a review of reviews of occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions, and a report on practitioner evidence needs – have been published today.
2. Safety Science – knowledge about risk and safety related issues more broadly, and how to assess and manage them. Safety is a very broad topic and covers many fields; we know from our initial feasibility study for the Centre that attempting to cover this breadth, at least initially, wouldn’t be useful. However, there are things that can be learned across fields of safety and common methods that can be applied across them. It is these commonalities that this evidence programme will seek to unpick.

As we embark on these initial evidence programmes, we are also recruiting more evidence experts to build the internal capacity of the Centre team.

What next?

This summer, we will be publishing two big scoping reviews looking at the evidence on how two of our global challenges impact on safe work: emerging technology, and climate change.

We know many people are working on these areas already, and while a lot of great knowledge has been gathered, we need to get that knowledge to those who can use it to keep people safe in the face of these emerging challenges. We must learn together, as quickly as possible, making the most of all the time, effort and funding that is going into these areas.

Later in the year, we will continue to develop our Safe Work evidence programme, with reports on the evidence needs of International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) safety standard setting committees, and the announcement of research and intervention projects we will be funding to put the findings of our World Risk Poll OSH report into action.

Our Safety Science programme will also pick up in earnest, with work on how to value safety in charitable impact, and mapping of the engineering safety research landscape. Looking into 2026 and beyond, it will include the publication of the next edition of the World Risk Poll.

Within three to five years, we aim to have made significant progress on the safe work evidence base, with what is already known being widely used, more robust and relevant new knowledge having been created, and effective solutions being used where they are needed most to improve safety outcomes.

The launch of the Global Safety Evidence Centre marks a pivotal moment in Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s mission to engineer a safer world. We hope you will come with us on its journey.