This is a question that many people are asking themselves as they face the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Safety and security are about physical protection from harm and helping to ensure psychological well-being, social stability, and economic prosperity.
In this newsletter, TAL Global, a leading security consulting and risk management firm, will explore three factors that may affect our level of safety and security in the future – and what we can do to prepare for them.
Safety, Security, and Technology
One of the main factors that may impact safety and security in the coming years is the growing role technology plays in our personal and corporate lives. But technology is evolving into a double-edged sword, offering both opportunities and risks.
On the one hand, it enhances our capabilities, improves efficiency, and allows us to connect quickly.
On the other hand, technology can – and has already – created new threats such as cyberattacks, bioterrorism, and allowed for the misuse of artificial intelligence.
Advances in technology can also disrupt other technologies that play vital roles in our daily personal and professional lives. These include threatening our electrical grids, business communication platforms, and governance.
At TAL Global, we remind our clients to be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of technology and adopt policies and procedures to help reduce their exposure to potentially harmful interference.
Safety, Security, and the Environment
If there is anything we have learned from this past summer, it is how much environmental changes are impacting our daily lives – and security. From the fires in Greece and Canada to the intensive heat experienced worldwide. According to Scientific American magazine:
June through August was the planet’s hottest documented three-month period, with July ranking as the hottest month ever recorded. *
The environment is the foundation of our survival and well-being, providing us with essential resources and services. However, the environment is also under increasing pressure from human activities, population growth, urbanization, consumption, wars, and pollution.
These activities are contributing to environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and natural disasters- all of which, have profound implications for our health, food, water, and energy security, and increase tensions in an already overly intense world.
Safety, Security, and Society
Society, as we are using the term here, refers to how we live and interact with each other. It can provide us with support, identity, belonging, or increasing distance and alienation. This can lead to conflict, attacks on individuals, corporations, colleges, and violence. Fostering these difficulties are tensions regarding diversity, political instability (here and around the world), economic inequality, and social injustice.
These issues can undermine our trust in each other, our cooperation, and the stability we need to go about our personal and professional lives without fear.
In our more than 25 years of providing security consulting and risk assessment services, we have never witnessed so many significant factors converging at the same time with the potential to negatively impact our lives and the daily operations of so many organizations.
Without question, now is the time for individuals and organizations to take all the necessary steps to stay alert and stay safe.
*Scientific American article Published September 7, 2023
