A leading health and safety expert has called on Dubai to set high targets for the forthcoming Expo 2020 or risk its reputation.
Jan Chmiel, chief executive of UK-based Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), said potential problems could be overcome through careful planning from the outset.
He told CW: “For me, it’s the reputational issue, which sometimes people can get blindsided on. I call it one of those black swan things. Sometimes, you don’t think about it until something happens and then it hits you and it can be, for some businesses, catastrophic. It’s a good way of managing the business.
“Setting high objectives. If you set those and you’ve got time, you can make sure health and safety is built right through the process.
“Quite often, these things can be client-led and health and safety can be built into the design phase, the tendering phase, so by the time you get somebody working on site, the thing has been thought through and planned through, so the implementation is a lot easier.
“For example, take Expo 2020 – if there was an objective which was built around sustainability, which was built around health and safety, protecting the workers building the event, and it was linked to reputation and outlined right at the very beginning, then I’m absolutely sure everything would fall into place.
“And IOSH, because we’re already here, would get sucked into supporting that structure – there would be more members involved and it would create more interest.”
Founded in 1945, IOSH is the world’s largest body for health and safety professionals. It is a registered charity with international NGO status and has 43,500 members in more than 100 countries – including 2,300 members (and growing) in the Middle East.
There are currently eight international branches – in the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Middle East, Oman, Qatar and Singapore, with plans to expand and develop the network further.
And while Chmiel revealed the Middle East contained the same health and safety objectives as elsewhere in the world, he admitted the pace of change in the region was an issue.
He added: “It’s just growing fast and with anything that grows fast there’s a health and safety issue to be looked at.
“If you think how much the Middle East and particularly the UAE and Dubai has grown over the last 10 years you can’t expect that society to have all the knowledge and experience just in that time, so how will we bring that knowledge and experience to bear? I think that’s where IOSH has a big role to play.”
