Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Societal safety sciences are new academic systems of interdisciplinary studies that combine specialized fields of social science and humanity in addition to those of science and technology for the purposes of preventing accidents and disasters that threaten human society, containing their severity and frequencies, reducing damages, rescuing the victims, and recovering and reconstructing the disaster areas. This chapter explains the position of societal safety sciences in issues related to our safety and outlines their methodologies and scopes.

As the phrase civilization of science and technology suggests, modern societies are built on top of highly sophisticated advancement of science and technology. This chapter reviews how societal safety sciences relate to problems in human societies and overviews challenges in modern societies.

We plan our safety measures under economic, personnel and time constraints. The extent of how far we take these measures depends on our acknowledgement of risk of whether we “stop because it is risky” or we “cannot stop because of its benefits despite its risks”. This chapter discusses our risk recognition and concerns about mass media that strongly affect our risk recognition. It also overviews differences in risk evaluation about natural disasters and social disasters.

The previous chapter discussed characteristics of contemporary societies in problems related to safety. Histories of birth of societies and cities and their maturing are deeply related to histories of birth and development of scholarship and science. This chapter overviews how scholarship and science were born, how they branched out and specialized, and then how they unified and formed interdisciplinary studies beyond boundaries of specialized fields. It also explains histories of various academic fields related to societal safety sciences.

Nature and societies that surround us are full of hazards. Depending on their intensities and surroundings, they develop into incidents. What artificial facilities are around, what actions people involved take, and states of societies or nature can further turn them into accidents or disasters. Risk management is ever more important for controlling such development and minimizing damages. This chapter overviews how hazards develop into accidents and damages and discusses several topics in risk management.

Natural disasters are damages to human lives or social activities caused by dangerous natural phenomena. This chapter quickly reviews the history of natural disasters, specifically for earthquakes and volcanic disasters, ground and sediment disasters, and water disasters, and discusses the mechanisms of how they break out and the typical damages they cause. Then the chapter explains predictions and countermeasures for disaster management.

This chapter discusses actual social disasters and damages they caused. The first section starts with some societal problems we face today. They are accidents due to aging infrastructures and difficulties in preventing them, nature and trends in accidents involving airplanes which are one of the most advanced industrial products today, characteristics of automobile accidents with the most serious social disasters in modern society in terms of the number of deaths and injured, and drug toxicity and safety in medical care. The following Sect. 7.2 analyzes human error, which is the most important factor in conducting analysis and investigation of accidents. Lastly, the third section closes the chapter with an overview of the history of major social disasters and their countermeasures.

Production and consumption pose a number of burdens on our ecological systems. The risk of causing damage to human health by environmental contamination is called, in general, environmental risk. Climate changes and infection to new pandemic influenza are believed also to be caused by the global human activities affecting global environment and ecological systems; thus, they often make part of environmental risks in the broad sense. This chapter explains each of these risks and unveils our unique methods in counter them.

Unlike accidents or natural disasters, war, crimes, and terrorism are all incidents caused by people’s specific intentions. Nevertheless, these events, just like accidents and natural disasters, are greatly influenced by development of scientific technology and social structures of political disagreement and economic disparities. This chapter overviews structures and what are special about war, crimes, and terrorism.

To protect our lives and properties from disasters and accidents, we need to identify sources of risks, acknowledge weaknesses in our societies and ourselves, and be readily prepared in both hardware and software. We frequently express the odds of events taking place with probabilistic numbers; thus, we must have at least the minimum knowledge in mathematical statistics. This chapter first introduces quantitative evaluations of probabilities of events to cause damages to us and the magnitudes of the damages. We will then learn how to analyze and estimate risks using the evaluations. The chapter closes with decision-making methods in finding the best measures that minimize the risks.