If we are going to move
forward the issue of safety in sustainability, then we have to do it together,
says Dennis Hudson, ASSE Director of Professional Affairs, in regards to ASSE,
IOSH and AIHA creating the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS).
More importantly, CSHS needs help and support from the safety community, he
adds. The Center represents about 85,000 safety professionals around the
world and aims to ensure that safety is included in all sustainability plans. It hopes to achieve the following:
- provide a strong voice and comprehensive leadership for safety and health in shaping sustainability policies;
- educate the business community on the importance of safety as part of good corporate governance and corporate social responsibility/sustainability;
- provide new insights into the measurement, management and impact of safety and health sustainability;
- be a recognized thought leader for sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
According to Tom Cecich, ASSE’s Vice President of
Professional Affairs, with the sustainability initiative in full spring, the
safety community needs to rally to make sure OHS is still on the forefront. "The
one thing we can influence is that workers around the world have the same basic
understanding of safety," he says. We need to have a mechanism and a
process by which safety is measured, we need to have comprehensive reporting
and we need to focus on leading indicators rather than lagging, he adds. Thanks
to community outreach, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has announced the
formation of a “Working Group” for OHS that will study performance indicators
to help create the content of their new G4 guidelines. The working group, chosen
and controlled by the GRI, will consist of about 20 people who will first
meet at the end of June. It takes three meetings to develop the metrics
followed by a 90-day comment period in August. In order to initially get attention
from the GRI, CSHS reached out to the safety community and asked members to write
letters and ask for representation. This is what worked and what we need to
continue to do during and after the comment period, Cecich says. The final
decision will be made this November, and the final version will be published by
the GRI in May 2013. For more information, visit the Center’s website.
