Engineering a safer world

Globally, we all rely on the ocean to provide food, energy, and the transit of goods and people. Yet, those who work at sea have some of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

Changing global workforce patterns, the impact of climate change, the energy transition and innovation in technology, all bring both threats and opportunities across a maritime system that is incredibly complex.

People, infrastructures and organisations together have an influence on, and are impacted by, global and local commercial maritime activity such as shipping, ports, regulation, finance, offshore wind, fishing, and aquaculture. Often the unintended consequences of advances made in one industry or location can unintentionally impact other parts of the maritime system.

Our focus
The maritime economy is fragmented, and workers are often informally employed. We will work to bring together diverse and unheard voices to share good practice and perspectives on safety challenges, towards interventions that improve safety and reduce risk to people across the maritime system. We will do this in a number of ways.

We will use the best available evidence and insight and work with those that have a stake in safer maritime systems to make targeted actions that improve safety, particularly in high-risk sectors like fishing, ferries, and seafaring.

We will work with stakeholders from across the maritime system and create partnerships to drive actions around safety risks. These partnerships, alongside the evidence we gather, will accelerate solutions for safer outcomes to the major challenges facing the maritime system, such as decarbonisation, digitalisation, and the impacts of climate change. In addition, Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Lloyd’s Register will continue to collaborate to serve a safer ocean economy.

“Just like the maritime system itself, we cannot scale change unless we work together. This is why developing partnerships to drive change and make a real difference to the safety of people across the maritime system is so important.”

Jan Przydatek
Director of Technologies, Maritime Systems and Future Infrastructure, at Lloyd's Register Foundation

The lives we live today are made possible by the infrastructures that provide us critical services such as energy, manufacturing, and transportation.

As we look to the future, higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and more frequent severe weather patterns all expose vulnerabilities in our infrastructure systems. Artificial Intelligence and autonomy will disrupt how we design, build and operate critical infrastructure. urgent technical, social and physical changes needed to successfully and safely decarbonise our energy systems.

Our focus
A key part of our strategy is to ensure that critical infrastructure is safe, resilient, and sustainable for years to come. The engineering systems that make up these infrastructures are increasingly interconnected so in partnership with others, we will work to ensure that disruptive technologies are adopted safely.

By understanding the technology and the system within which it will be applied, we can influence the steps needed to avoid harm.

In addition, we will focus on working in partnership with others towards the safe decarbonisation of the energy system. This transition relies on significant growth of supporting infrastructures which must be built and operated safely. Plus, we will focus on ensuring critical infrastructures are developed to be resilient to climate change and work with nature.

Through developing partnerships, we can collectively help drive change and make a real difference to managing safety risks, while keeping critical infrastructure resilient.

“Focusing on the increasing deployment of cyber-physical systems, the scaling of sustainable assets and the adaptation of infrastructures to the effects of climate change, our strategy targets safer outcomes for all.”

Jan Przydatek
Director of Technologies, Maritime Systems and Future Infrastructure at Lloyd's Register Foundation

Safe infrastructure needs qualified engineers, and to meet the demands of urbanisation, industrialisation and a rapidly growing population, we need a new approach to engineering
education that has diversity, equity and inclusion at its heart.

Equally, this approach needs to ensure there are safe and decent work opportunities for an engineering workforce that has the capacity, capability and understanding to adopt new and emerging technologies, safely.

Our focus
We are building a global evidence base to understand where engineering capacity and capability are most lacking, helping identify which interventions are most effective to address safety challenges in their local context. We will champion skills initiatives that will support a safe, equitable and just transition to zero-carbon fuels, and we will work with others to develop the capacity to implement and enforce international standards for safety.

Through targeted interventions aimed at better safety outcomes, we will build partnerships that help to remove barriers for new talent and underrepresented demographics to enter the engineering workforce. Plus, we will ensure engineering skills and education develop at a pace that aligns with rapid technological innovation, including robotics and autonomous systems.

In addition, we will fund initiatives that effectively upskill engineers where they are most needed to ensure our built environment remains safe, sustainable and resilient.

“As the global population grows and becomes increasingly urban, we need to build, maintain and operate resilient critical infrastructure on a large scale. But the world is facing an engineering skills shortage. By working in partnership with others we can focus on where engineering capacity and capability are most needed, collectively enhancing the skills that increase people’s safety.”

Tim Slingsby
Director of Skills and Education at Lloyd's Register Foundation

Evidence is critical to improving safety, but often does not yet exist or is not easily accessible. Across the world and in different sectors, there is a huge opportunity to improve safety outcomes by finding, sharing and growing better quality evidence on both the scale and nature of the challenges, and on what works, to address them.

But simply finding and generating that evidence is not enough – it must also be relevant, understandable, accessible, and actionable by those in a position to put it into practice.

Our focus
To support us in delivering impact across our new strategy’s priority areas we will take an evidence-led approach. Whether it is in the maritime sector, on critical infrastructure, or building skills and education, we have a commitment to find, share and grow more robust evidence to better understand the complex factors that affect safety.

Taking this commitment one step further, we are working towards the establishment of a Global Safety Evidence Centre, which will serve as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for anyone who needs to know ‘what works’ to make people safer – collating the best evidence from our partners and other sources, as well as providing a home for the Foundation’s own evidence outputs, such as our flagship World Risk Poll, which is the first and only global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety.

“Evidence is key to improving safety, yet it is often limited, fragmented or hard to access. By finding, sharing and growing evidence that is robust, trusted and accessible, we can help people in all sectors make confident and effective decisions to create safer environments and tackle challenges with informed, practical solutions.”

Nancy Hey
Director of Evidence and Insight at Lloyd's Register Foundation

For more than 250 years, Lloyd’s Register has been ensuring
that ships, their crews and cargoes are safe to go to sea. This puts us in a unique position to be able to learn from the past to inform, inspire and shape a safer, more sustainable, and resilient ocean economy.

Our focus
The Lloyd’s Register Foundation archive is a unique research resource which offers a unique perspective on the evolution of maritime safety and the complex factors that drive this process.

Our collection over 1.1 million documents shows the construction, maintenance and development of ships and maritime trade from the 1830s, and is freely available to all, both on-line and in-person at our new heritage centre.

Our heritage team works with a diverse range of partners across the globe to unlock both the value of this archive and supporting a ‘learning from the past’ approach to maritime safety and sustainability challenges more broadly.

“Our maritime heritage enables us to support the Foundation’s wider strategy to keep people safer. By unlocking historical insights, we can deepen our understanding of present and future challenges across the maritime sector and help to build a safer, more sustainable, and resilient ocean economy for generations to come.”

Alex Stitt
Director of Heritage and Education at Lloyd's Register Foundation