Evidence programmes

Through the World Risk Poll, we know that almost one in five of the global workforce have experienced harm while working. Despite these high figures, it isn’t high on the list of things most people worry about.

Through this focus area, the Centre seeks to contribute to the evidence base in support of Sustainable Development Goal 8.8 on promoting safe working environments.

What people and official data tell us

Research priorities

A review of the state of the evidence shows that safety terms are poorly defined, and that interventions are inconsistent and often not evaluated. We are therefore looking to bring together the relevant knowledge, tools and methods to help improve safety outcomes at work. We want to:

• Build a shared understanding of global workplace safety issues, as well as which interventions are effective and how we know they work. 
• Identify gaps in existing knowledge in research, policy and practice. We will do this with partners by mapping practitioner and policymaker experience and knowledge, and considering this against the existing evidence base. 

We are especially interested in sharing and growing global knowledge on:

• Occupational safety and health (OSH) intervention effectiveness.
• Improving workplace safety effectively in the context of: high hazard industries (including the ocean economy);  climate change adaptation; emerging technology; decarbonisation; and rapidly changing populations and industries.
• Improving safety effectively in engineering, informal work, and in smaller organisations without dedicated safety professionals.
• How to embed safety evidence into national or sector safety plans.

Safety science is knowledge about safety and risk related issues more broadly, and how to assess and manage them. It considers how individuals, organisations and communities understand, assess, measure and manage safety, and how we learn from the past.

Safety is a broad field used in many disciplines, professions and contexts. We want to look at what can be used across multiple disciplines. We use the following definitions: 

• Safety: the prevention of accidental death, serious injury (human), loss or damage (of/to physical assets or the environment).
• Engineering safety: identifying and mitigating potential hazards to protect people, property, and the environment from harm, by applying scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, maintain (and decommission) safe structures, machines, systems and processes.
• Safety science: understanding, preventing, and mitigating risks and hazards to ensure the safety and wellbeing of individuals, organisations, and communities. This covers:
  • Knowledge about safety related issues.
  • Tools and methods for safety: the development of concepts, theories, principles and methods to understand, assess, communicate and manage (in a broad sense) safety.
  • The discipline as a whole: covering the totality of relevant educational programmes, journals, papers, researchers, research groups and societies.

We include the World Risk Poll and Resilience Index in our Safety Science evidence programme as tools and methods for safety. We also work with our Heritage Centre to learn from the past.

Research priorities

At present, safety terms can be poorly defined, while interventions and measures are inconsistent and are often not evaluated. We are seeking to bring together the relevant knowledge, tools and methods to help improve safety outcomes. This could include concepts, theories, principles and methods to understand, assess, communicate and manage safety. We are interested in projects including reviews on:

• How to manage emerging risks to safety.
• Concepts and indicators of safety. 
• How to measure and value safety.
• Safety tools and methods to understand what is transferable between different sectors and contexts.

At Lloyd’s Register Foundation, we know that learning from the past is also an essential part of how we make the world a safer place. We are interested in safety science projects that focus on: 

• Learning from success: what has worked in reducing major incidents and fatalities, in which contexts and why; how were major, retrospectively-acknowledged improvements in safety interventions and outcomes achieved? 
• Learning from failure: learning from mistakes, inquiries, incidents and disasters.
• ‘Hindsight history’ and historical sources as evidence: learning from the past.
• The ‘longtail’ of incidents, accidents and disasters: examining their longer-term impacts and legacies, including cascading effects, how to bounce back, and how trust is rebuilt.