Discover the Foncsi’s 2025 Activity Report

The world of safety is becoming more complex, at scales previously unimagined. Traditional siloed approaches addressing each safety issue separately are losing relevance, giving way to cross cutting reflections, models, and organizations that span all these forms of safety (product safety, facilities, occupational health and safety, environmental safety, cyber safety). Foncsi, long focused solely on product and facilities safety, expanded its focus in 2025 to the global governance of these various forms of safety, particularly through the strengthening of its scientific monitoring on the subject, made available to the community (monthly reading advice, Cahiers).

The world of safety is not independent of the broader developments shaping the industrial world. Openness must lead both to a more systemic way of thinking about safety and to paying even closer attention to the international landscape and to the diversity of industrial sectors, since the influence of Europe – and France in particular – is tending to decline in the setting of new global standards. In 2025, Foncsi accelerated its systemic analysis of risks, notably through strategic analysis of new global industrial champions and through the expansion and strengthened consolidation of its close network of international safety experts.

The world of safety is being profoundly reshaped by the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), which simultaneously carries promises of safety improvements and the emergence of new risks. In 2025, Foncsi produced a first Industrial Safety “Cahier” on this topic, as part of an initial strategic analysis of the issue – two initiatives that are clearly only an entry point into a concern that will become a lasting one in the years to come.

The world of safety is not sanctuarized. The challenge is no longer simply to equip ourselves to identify deviations and eliminate them in order to remain within a safe standard. We must “live with” the idea that we will not return to past standards, and that safety must be rethought within an adaptive framework, articulated with the other challenges faced by high risk industries. How do we “live with” this new reality: a crisis – or rather a new situation – in human resources, skills, and recruitment in the sector; the arrival of new technologies; shifting priorities, notably in response to political messages that revise the relative importance of different forms of safety and the resources devoted to them; the rise of all kinds of threats (malicious acts, delinquency, organized crime), and now even acts of war? Foncsi has embarked on an international and national reflection on this new way of “living with” changes and new threats that cannot be stopped. A strong and lasting network of international experts and French experts from both academia and the field has been built to sustain and feed this reflection. The first publications are beginning to appear, both in the Industrial Safety “Cahiers” series and in Foncsi’s book collection published by Springer.

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See you next year, with a new series of achievements shared with our donors, our networks, and beyond them the global web – this being the very purpose of a public-interest foundation.