Society is put under tremendous strain by the potentials for new forms of crime, climate changes and increased system dependencies. These threats produce new patterns of risk and vulnerability. Traditionally, safety management and societal safety has been oriented towards distributing roles and responsibilities.
The new strains of society involve risks to which clear-cut roles and responsibilities cannot necessarily be assigned. How are we able to acknowledge and deal with risks whose responsibility is distributed over a wide variety of stakeholders?
To fully acknowledge these changes implies accepting that current risk approaches may fall short. The new strains of society summon a strong need for new thinking, new methods and new approaches towards risk and vulnerability.
The project will explore how existing methodological principles and approaches can be related to and be translated into complex threat scenarios involving several systems in interplay, pronounced uncertainty, possibilities for escalation, as well as vulnerabilities that may serve to connect various systems, potentially acting to generate, transfer and relocate risk.
The New Strains project will provide
new scientific theory regarding risk acknowledgement and hidden, dynamic and emergent vulnerabilities
new research based approaches to explore and analyze new threat scenarios in complex system landscapes
an arena for knowledge development, communication, and interdisciplinary experience interchange; designed for participation, involvement and collaboration of both researchers and user groups
an arena for comparative analyzes by inviting and collaboration with international partners
a systematic and targeted research agenda, aiming to develop a scientific research environment for addressing and building knowledge relating to the new strains of society