Safety leadership and the lessons still going unlearned

Introduction

At our event at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London on 23 September 2026, Dame Judith Hackitt asked a question for all safety leaders: are we really making progress? For this year’s Annual Lecture, we partnered with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), bringing together our Annual Lecture and IMechE’s Hugh Ford Prestige Lecture in one joint event. An online audience also joined those attending at One Great George Street.

Exploring safety leadership as a moral and ethical responsibility, Dame Judith acknowledged the considerable improvements made during her career. Yet organisations continued to repeat failures they should already know how to prevent. Her accounts of decisions made under pressure challenged us to consider what it takes to turn knowledge into safer working practices.

Key themes and discussions

Being honest when the consequences are uncomfortable

Dame Judith recalled investigating an incident in which an operator was seriously injured while using a scaffold pole to clear a blockage in a rotating drum. Her investigation revealed that a supervisor and commissioning engineer had known about the unsafe practice for several days. When her managing director pressured her to reconsider her report, Dame Judith refused to conceal their prior knowledge of the practice. The company was prosecuted, but she has never doubted her decision to report what she had found. As Judith told the audience: “If we do not admit our mistakes, we cannot learn from them.”

Looking beyond the immediate cause

During her time leading the Health and Safety Commission and subsequently the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Dame Judith saw around 1,000 fatality reports. She could not recall encountering anything new or unexpected, raising difficult questions about why lessons failed to travel between organisations, or even between sites within the same company.

The 2005 Buncefield explosion illustrated the problem. A faulty level gauge led to a tank overflowing, but the fault had been known about for months. While waiting for repairs, operators had brought in an alarm clock to time transfers. An investigation that stopped at the faulty equipment would miss the wider failure: why had a reported problem remained unresolved? Audience discussion returned to the need to examine these underlying causes and recognise lessons from other sectors.

Taking responsibility beyond compliance

Following the Grenfell Tower fire, Dame Judith’s independent review of building regulations and fire safety found fragmented responsibility and poorly enforced rules. Many people had already known the system was broken yet concentrated on their own tasks without connecting them to the purpose of providing safe buildings.

She acknowledged the continuing need to remove cladding from affected buildings, while warning that this alone would leave deeper failures unexamined. Construction had made substantial progress in protecting people on site, but the same duty of care had not extended to occupants. Professional responsibility required industry to work with regulators on solutions and act without waiting to be told exactly what compliance should look like.

Making it safe to challenge accepted thinking

Drawing on her experience as one of very few women on her engineering course, Dame Judith connected inclusion with better safety leadership. Valuing different perspectives helped organisations question established assumptions. Leaders needed to make it safe for people to raise concerns and ensure those concerns influenced decisions. A monthly review of past safety performance could not, on its own, provide that understanding.

Call to action and next steps

The lecture and audience discussion pointed to several actions for safety leaders:

• Look beyond the immediate cause of an incident to understand why warnings were missed or problems left unresolved.
• Share learning across sites and sectors, questioning assumptions that another organisation’s failure could never happen in your own.
• Support people who raise concerns, including when their evidence challenges colleagues or senior management.
• Take responsibility for everyone affected by your work, including those who will use or occupy what you design and build.

Conclusion

Our Annual Lecture left us with a demanding measure of progress: whether lessons have changed how organisations behave. With Grenfell’s tenth anniversary approaching, Dame Judith returned to what the professions owe those who died and everyone still living with the consequences. Her challenge was to admit mistakes honestly and have the courage to act on concerns, especially when doing so is uncomfortable.

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Each year, millions of workers worldwide lose their lives due to occupational accidents and work-related diseases, while millions more experience non-fatal work-related injuries. Despite decades of safety improvements, similar incidents continue to occur across industries, often because vital lessons remain locked in silos, delayed by legal processes or buried in technical reports.

The Thomas Ashton Institute (TAI), The University of Manchester (UoM), and the EEMUA (The Engineering Equipment & Materials Users Association) have announced the start of the Enhanced Learning from Incidents (ELFi) project, a research initiative developed with the Hazards Forum and  industry partners to change this.

Considerable work has already been done on incident investigation, root cause analysis and formal safety assessment to enable specific parties to learn from incidents. However, events with common causes still occur. Industry and regulators increasingly recognise that the challenge is not simply identifying lessons, but ensuring that organisations see their relevance, link them to their own sites and operations, act on them effectively and embed the learning sustainably. This is especially true when incidents occur outside an organisation’s own sector, or even apparently unrelated activity.

Drawing on TAI’s and UoM’s rigorous analysis and specialist expertise, the project will:

• Analyse how incidents are reported, investigated, and shared across sectors
• Identify barriers and enablers to effective learning and cross-sector knowledge transfer, including siloed or inconsistent reporting systems and cultural resistance to disclosure
• Define best practice for incident reporting and sharing
• Develop a practical cross-sector learning framework, toolkit, and adoption roadmap
• Work with regulators, trade associations, industry bodies, and the Hazards Forum to support real-world adoption and a cultural shift towards proactive learning

The aim is to deliver practical guidance and pilot-tested tools that help industry learn faster and apply lessons more effectively, saving lives, protecting assets and reducing environmental harm.

“Back in 2022, IChemE approached Hazards Forum to ask if we would, with the interdisciplinary spread of our members, take on the challenge of improving learning from incidents across the UK. We accepted the challenge and realised early on that we needed to bring on board an academic partner. We felt that the Thomas Ashton Institute (TAI) for Risk and Regulatory Research would be ideally placed due to their combination of academia and regulation. We subsequently engaged with EEMUA who expressed an interest in funding the project, and they finally put pen to paper this week.

“I and Hazards Forum are delighted to have been able to bring partners together to make this happen. It’s hugely important work and we look forward to supporting the initiative and ultimately seeing the findings put into practice.”

Nick Shaw, Distinguished Member of Hazards Form

“EEMUA is committed to standards that improve safety and help prevent accidents. Good practice on investigating incidents already exists, but the real challenge is helping operators recognise how a lesson from any industry applies to their own site, and then act on it. We look forward to working with TAI and inviting our members to engage with this project and help shape tools that work in practice.”
Stefan Kukula, CEO, EEMUA

“Organisations rarely lack incident reports; what is often missing is a reliable way to recognise when a lesson from another sector applies to them, and to act on it before a similar event happens. By working alongside EEMUA, its members, regulators and safety professionals from the outset, we will build a strong evidence base and then co-design and pilot a framework and toolkit that turn incident data into contextualised, actionable learning across sectors.”
Prof Martie van Tongeren, Thomas Ashton Institute

“Most industries already investigate their incidents carefully, but those lessons rarely travel beyond the sector, or even the site, where they happened. Over the course of this initiative, we’ll work with EEMUA members, regulators, and safety professionals to find out why, and co-design a framework and toolkit that are tested on real industry cases rather than on paper. We’d welcome organisations from any sector that want to help shape it.”
Dr Saeed Reza Mohandes, Principal Investigator, University of Manchester

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In November 2025, the Nuclear Regulatory Review described a sector preoccupied with paperwork at the expense of real safety and deeply conservative in the face of innovation. The Prime Minister called it a mindset of process over outcome and asked for the lessons to be applied across the industrial strategy. In June we brought together around 30 senior practitioners from across the major hazard industries and the bodies that regulate them, to test whether this diagnosis can be applied to other sectors.

There was no argument raised for less regulation. In our session, we discussed a system in which requirements accumulate without older ones being removed, and in which regulation responds to accidents rather than anticipating technology. It appears, the effort in demonstrating safety is starting to drift away from the work of achieving it. Three areas in particular came through as needing further work during our discussions.

Make interpretation consistent enough that duty holders can push back

ALARP is increasingly understood to mean as low as the regulator will permit, rather than as low as is reasonably practicable. This moves the driver of risk reduction from the duty holder to the regulator, and over-compliance may be the rational response. Operators who ask a regulator for clarity are sometimes told that only a court can settle the point. The same installation, assessed by different inspectors at different times, produces different conclusions. The cost of getting it wrong falls on the operator alone, so there is little incentive to challenge the regulator’s interpretation.

Standardised assessment approaches spare a regulator from learning a bespoke method before they can assess it, and industry forums give duty holders somewhere to rehearse challenge rather than risk it. Where a risk sits below the threshold that makes it intrinsically ALARP, one line of justification should be enough.

Return the safety case to the people who operate the plant

Better models already exist. The Low Level Waste Repository has built digital safety cases in which a change in one system carries across the others. Sellafield presents its substantiation at three levels of depth for three different audiences. The remaining obstacle is version control, since any continuously updated system must still support a fixed configuration at the point assessment. Industry and regulators should be solving that together. It is also worth asking how much assurance a document delivers at all, when a day on site with an experienced inspector may reveal more.

Treat judgement as the capability most at risk

Good safety decisions rest on judgement, and judgement comes in its most valuable form from experience rather than training alone. The nuclear sector employs almost 100,000 people and is losing experience faster than it is replacing it. In rail, legacy fleets are giving way to software-driven systems while the people who hold the whole picture approach retirement. An inspector who has never worked in the industry they oversee is also poorly placed to make a proportionate call. The Nuclear Skills Plan shows what a strategic response looks like, and other sectors need comparable ambition. Organisations also need to let people make mistakes in survivable conditions.

Asking what actually makes us safer

Government also plays a role in creating the conditions for progress. Early-stage studies can be difficult for businesses to justify when there is still uncertainty around regulatory approval, which is where targeted support could make a real difference. Longer-term policy certainty is just as important, particularly for major programmes where investment decisions stretch far beyond the usual funding cycle.

Does this activity make things safer? This was a question that came up repeatedly in our discussions, and where the answer is unclear, there is good reason to examine whether this activity is adding value. The health of the system can also be judged in much the same way as it is in aviation, where an increase in near-miss reporting alongside a fall in serious incidents can be a sign that risks are being identified before they lead to harm. If regulators stop finding issues, or organisations stop reporting near misses, that does not necessarily mean the system has become safer. It may instead suggest that fewer people are looking closely enough to find them.

The full report is available to Hazards Forum members. Join us to take a closer look at the issues affecting safety and regulation across major hazard industries.

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By 28 July, fire and rescue services in England and Wales had responded to 706 wildfires in 2026. More than 200 of those incidents were recorded in less than two weeks, during another spell of prolonged hot and dry weather.

In North Wales, a wildfire in the Rhinogydd burned across remote, protected habitats and required helicopter support. Drought was later declared across North Wales and the Upper Severn after a prolonged spell of hot, dry weather had put further pressure on the region. At the time of publication, significant fires are still affecting parts of the country. In the New Forest National Park, one has forced the closure of a main A road between Southampton and Bournemouth, with repairs needed before the route can reopen.

For Hazards Forum, our concern goes beyond the number of incidents. Wildfires can put pressure on a number of services, including power, water and communications at the same time as those systems may be needed to support the response. They can threaten industrial sites and create knock-on hazards long after a fire itself has been brought under control. These were among the consequences raised when we brought together specialists to discuss the issue in 2024.

Our roundtable, Preparing the UK for Wildfires of the Future, gathered people working across wildfire response, research, regulation and infrastructure to consider how the UK understands and manages wildfire risk.

Two years on, the question we perhaps should be asking ourselves is whether our approach is keeping pace.

Understanding the risk before the fire starts 

Professor Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London argued at the roundtable that the UK needs a more rigorous, science-based way of characterising wildfire risk. This means knowing where fires are more likely, where the consequences could be greatest and what protection already exists.

His work since the event makes the case for looking beyond individual incidents. Research into the 2022 London wildfires identified what his team describes as ‘firewaves’: cascading wildfires driven by the same heatwave, with the potential to overwhelm fire and rescue resources.

In managing the risks of wildfires, we need to be considering what happens if several fires occur across the region at once. And, what if these same conditions are also putting pressure on water supplies, power networks or staff availability?

Rein’s team has also tested leading wildfire spread models, including models from the US and Canada, and an AI model developed by Google. No single model performed consistently well. Combining predictions, however, produced a better probability map of how a wildfire might behave. For planners that supports embracing the uncertainty.

Our roundtable reached a similar conclusion from a risk-management perspective. Participants discussed using tools such as the Bowtie model to identify the barriers that prevent a wildfire starting, limit its spread or reduce its consequences, then make clear who is responsible for each one.

Water is a resilience issue too 

Our discussion in 2024 also exposed a basic dependency, namely that firefighting requires water, and a major wildfire can arrive during the same hot, dry conditions already stretching water supplies.

Seamus Doyle of Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service described work with Welsh Water to make UV-treated wastewater available for firefighting. His later update showed what turning an idea into an operational option involves. Firefighting teams have trained using bowsers and appliances at UV treatment sites, access has been tested, monitoring arrangements have been developed with the water company and work has continued on fitting hydrants to raw-water mains.

The 2024 roundtable considered how wildfire damage could interrupt critical infrastructure and, in some circumstances, trigger secondary chemical or industrial incidents. This would then require extra resources from the Fire and Rescue Service thereby further constraining the resources. It also raised the risk of flooding, erosion and landslip after vegetation has been destroyed.

Progress, but no room for complacency 

There has been movement since our roundtable. In his 2025 update, Rob Stacey of the England and Wales Wildfire Forum pointed to new Level 1 wildfire training for operational fire and rescue personnel, work on a National Wildfire Training Framework and research into wildfire management planning.

There have also been changes at government level. In June 2026, specialist wildfire teams were announced for Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Northumberland, London and South Wales, alongside a wider £97 million upgrade of National Resilience assets. The teams are intended to deploy across England when large incidents put pressure on local services.

Fire and rescue services are, however, only one part of the answer. Wildfire risk also sits with those managing land, infrastructure, regulation and local resilience, alongside government and high-hazard industries. Our roundtable showed that there is no shortage of expertise across these areas, but it is how those responsibilities connect, and who takes ownership when they overlap. Education and awareness raising within society has a role to play considering that wildfires tend not to occur naturally.

Risk assessments need to consider what surrounds a site, how changing conditions affect exposure, which barriers would protect people and operations, and what external systems the response relies on.

Our 2024 roundtable called for high-hazard industries to give wildfire greater consideration within their existing risk arrangements. This summer, that call to action feels more relevant than ever. Professor Rein ended his follow-up with a simple judgement: the UK has the expertise but needs a coordinated effort to turn it into action. When the conditions worsen again, will the right barriers and resources already be in place?

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Background

In March 2026, the House of Lords Committee on National Resilience published a call for written evidence for its inquiry into national and local preparedness and resilience. It was inviting interested individuals and organisations to submit their views on these issues.

The House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience was appointed on 27 January 2026. It is chaired by Baroness Coussins and will report by 30 November 2026. This inquiry will address the current context for preparedness and resilience, including the threats which the UK currently faces; how to achieve a whole of society approach in which everyone plays a role in achieving resilience; the interconnectedness of risks across different threats, sectors, countries, and timeframes; and strategic gaps which could be addressed, including in the private sector.

Hazards Forum was invited to submit evidence for the inquiry, and it responded to two questions.

Hazards Forum response to Question 1: How far are national and international risks inter-connected, including across different sectors and across short-term and long-term risks, and what are the implications for the national approach towards preparedness and resilience?

The interconnected nature of national and international risks

The Hazards Forum’s October 2025 workshop on Cascading and Interconnected Hazards, convened with participants from across engineering, safety, regulation, nuclear, defence, infrastructure and academia, provides direct evidence relevant to this question. Our submission draws on the collective expertise and discussion outputs from that event.

The nature and extent of risk interconnection

National and international risks are deeply and increasingly interconnected across sectors, timescales and geographies. The workshop examined real-world examples that illustrate how a hazard originating in one domain rapidly propagates into others:

• the Fukushima disaster combined seismic, flooding and nuclear consequences
• the 2025 Spain and Portugal power outage demonstrated how failure in energy infrastructure cascades into economic, social and public safety impacts
• the Texas winter storm of 2021 showed how AI-managed energy grid systems can amplify rather than moderate the effects of an extreme weather event

These are not isolated incidents, but emblematic of a structural shift. As populations, infrastructure and processes become more interconnected, and as digital systems, supply chains and environmental systems increasingly span national borders, the boundaries between sectors that traditional risk management treats as distinct are becoming unreliable. In short, what was once a localised failure can now propagate at speed across critical systems.

The workshop identified that risks do not simply co-exist but interact and compound, either simultaneously or in succession, in ways that conventional risk assessment frameworks are ill-equipped to anticipate. Linear cause-and-effect models, exemplified by the bow-tie diagram familiar to safety practitioners, are increasingly inadequate representations of the highly interdependent systems with multiple feedback loops that now characterise our critical infrastructure and natural environment.

Short-term and long-term risk: a false separation

The workshop highlighted that the distinction between short-term and long-term risks can itself become a source of systemic vulnerability. Decisions taken in response to short-term operational pressures, such as optimising for efficiency over resilience, can over time erode the buffers that protect against long-term or low-frequency, high-consequence events. Legacy nuclear waste management and climate change were cited as cases in which the consequences of inaction compound over time, and where the interconnection between near-term decisions and long-term outcomes is poorly understood and inadequately communicated to decision-makers.

This creates a particular challenge for national preparedness: the planning cycles and accountability structures of government and industry are often misaligned with the timescales over which cascading risks develop and interact.

Implications for national preparedness and resilience

The workshop’s findings point to several implications for national approach:

• Resilience must take precedence over optimisation. The Spanish power grid failure was cited as a direct consequence of insufficient resilience in a highly centralised system. A more distributed architecture would have contained the failure. National preparedness frameworks should evaluate whether efficiency-driven design choices in critical infrastructure are creating systemic vulnerabilities to cascading failure.
• Risk assessment must shift toward consequence-based thinking. Rather than attempting to enumerate all possible initiating events (a task increasingly futile in complex, interdependent systems), preparedness planning should focus on the right-hand (consequences) side of the bowtie: asking whether barriers and response capabilities are sufficient to limit consequences once an event is under way. This reframing also supports better decision-making under uncertainty, which is an unavoidable feature of the turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous environment in which we now operate.
• Cross-sector knowledge sharing is a national resilience asset. The workshop found that knowledge about complex hazards and effective mitigation is largely siloed within sectors and organisations, and that sharing is most likely to occur in non-competitive environments. The aviation industry was cited as a model for systematic cross-sector learning. National resilience frameworks should invest in creating structured, trusted forums for inter-sector intelligence sharing, treating the quality of that knowledge network as a component of national resilience in its own right.
• Communication failures are a systemic risk. Across all three workshop discussions, communication emerged as a critical vulnerability: between engineers and senior leaders, between technical specialists and the public, and between risk professionals and regulators. Where risk information is poorly framed, misunderstood or simply not transmitted upward with sufficient clarity, decision-making is impaired at precisely the moments when it matters most. Preparedness frameworks must treat communication capability, not just technical risk assessment, as a core competency.
• Competence and judgement matter as much as data. In novel or unprecedented scenarios, engineering judgement is essential. Yet that judgement depends on competence that is maintained, tested and honest about its own limits. The workshop found that individuals’ ability to exercise sound judgement is uneven, and that admitting uncertainty is not yet sufficiently normalised in professional practice. National resilience planning should support cultures where limits of knowledge are surfaced rather than concealed.

Conclusion

The interconnection of risks is a present reality, as recent events in the UK and around the world have demonstrated. Existing preparedness frameworks were largely designed for a world in which risks were more bounded, more predictable, and more separable, but that world is changing. The Hazards Forum recommends that the Committee consider the structural shift from linear to systemic risk as the central framing challenge for national resilience, and that cross-sector learning, consequence-focused planning and communication competence be elevated as national resilience priorities alongside technical risk assessment capability.

Hazards Forum response to Question 2: What national risks could have the most severe impact in a reasonable worst-case scenario, including nuclear accidents and loss of control of satellite communications?

National risks with the most severe impact in a reasonable worst-case scenario

The Hazards Forum draws on two bodies of evidence to address this question: our October 2025 workshop on Cascading and Interconnected Hazards, and our dedicated event on space weather and its potential impact on critical national infrastructure. Together, these point to a category of risk that the Committee should treat as a priority concern: low-frequency, high-consequence events that interact with and amplify vulnerabilities across multiple critical systems simultaneously.

Space weather as a severe and underestimated national risk

Extreme space weather, in particular, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) producing intense geomagnetic storms, represents one of the most severe risks in any reasonable worst-case scenario assessment. Unlike many hazards, a major space weather event does not respect sector boundaries. It has the potential to simultaneously affect power transmission, satellite communications, aviation, rail networks and nuclear facilities across the UK and internationally.

The Hazards Forum’s space weather event highlighted the scale of the monitoring challenge. The Met Office’s Space Weather Operations Centre has invested significantly in new operational models through the £20 million SWIMMR programme, including development of the GORGON model for forecasting Geomagnetic Induced Current (GIC) in power and rail networks. Yet even with these advances, a critical warning window problem remains, namely coronal mass ejections offer only around 20 minutes of warning. This interval is wholly insufficient for managed, coordinated responses across complex national systems.

The May 2024 Gannon storm, rated G5 (the highest category), offered a real-world demonstration of the disruption potential, causing disruptions to aircraft and ground electronics and necessitating flight path adjustments.

The cascading potential of such an event is acute. A severe geomagnetic storm capable of damaging high-voltage transformers in the national grid would trigger electricity outages affecting all systems dependent on power: communications, transport management, water treatment, hospitals and financial infrastructure. Critically, there is concern that plant operators may disconnect assets due to poor information, itself risking cascading blackouts. This is a sobering illustration of how the response to a hazard can compound its consequences if not carefully managed.

Nuclear facilities and space weather: an insufficiently recognised intersection

The question specifically raises nuclear accidents as a severe risk category, and space weather introduces a dimension that is not yet adequately addressed in nuclear safety thinking internationally.

A recent NEA (Nuclear Energy Agency) report has raised concerns that GIC (Geomagnetic Induced Current) risks to nuclear power plants may not be adequately considered, with only Canada, Sweden and the UK, all at high geographic latitudes, currently accounting for space weather in nuclear plant design and operation. This is a significant gap given that GIC vulnerability may be determined less by geography and more by electrical line connectivity and geology – factors that apply across a much wider range of sites globally.

The NEA has recommended that nuclear power plant operators review their plant safety cases for GIC risks, and the Hazards Forum supports this as an urgent priority. The interaction between an extreme space weather event and a nuclear facility experiencing GIC-induced equipment failures represents a compound scenario – natural hazard meeting engineered system vulnerability – of the kind that our cascading hazards workshop identified as the most challenging and dangerous class of risk.

Satellite communications: systemic dependency and fragility

Loss or degradation of satellite communications would have consequences far beyond the obvious disruption to navigation and telecommunications. Modern critical infrastructure, including energy grid management, financial transactions, precision agriculture, emergency services coordination and military operations, is deeply dependent on satellite timing signals and data relay. Risks to satellites from increasing orbital congestion were highlighted at our space weather event, adding a human-made dimension to the natural hazard risk. A severe space weather event coinciding with elevated orbital congestion could produce a compounding scenario in which both the event itself and the collision debris it generates degrade satellite availability over an extended period.

The need for real-time forecasting models for extreme events, such as those seen in March 1991 and May 2024, to enhance satellite safety is well understood by the technical community, but the translation of that understanding into resilience planning across satellite-dependent industries remains immature. The Hazards Forum notes that industries currently lack mature approaches for infrequent hazards such as extreme space weather – a systemic preparedness gap that is directly relevant to the Committee’s question.

The compounding risk: when space weather meets interconnected infrastructure

The severity of a reasonable worst-case space weather scenario is not simply a function of the physical event itself, but of the degree to which modern infrastructure has developed interdependencies that were not present during previous extreme solar events.

Our cascading hazards workshop found that linear cause-and-effect models are increasingly inadequate representations of the highly interdependent systems with multiple feedback loops that now characterise critical infrastructure. An event on the scale of the largest magnetic storm on record, the so-called Carrington Event of 1859, before electrified grids, digital communications and satellite networks existed, would be categorically different in its consequences.

Implications for national preparedness

The Hazards Forum draws the following conclusions for national resilience planning in relation to this risk category:

• Extreme space weather should be treated as a Tier 1 national risk with dedicated cross-sector resilience planning, recognising its potential to simultaneously degrade power, communications, transport, and nuclear safety systems.
• The 20-minute CME warning window demands pre-authorised, pre-rehearsed response protocols across grid operators, nuclear facility managers, aviation authorities, and satellite operators — not guidance that requires real-time deliberation.
• Nuclear safety cases should be reviewed for GIC exposure as a matter of regulatory priority, particularly given the NEA’s finding that this risk is inadequately characterised at most facilities internationally.
• Resilience by design, including shielding, redundancy, and passive systems, should be mandated for critical national infrastructure procured or upgraded going forward, with space weather tolerance specified as a design requirement rather than left as an afterthought.
• Historical data must inform, but not constrain, worst-case planning. Large error bars in extreme event predictions due to limited data remain a challenge, and planners should be cautious about anchoring preparedness to the observed record when the physical science suggests more extreme events are possible.

The Hazards Forum is committed to supporting further cross-sector work in this area, including through exercises, scenario planning, and the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge sharing that our workshop programme is designed to facilitate.

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