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World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2012 - Green jobs: promoting safety and health in a green economy

The increasing focus on finding new sources of energy and other environmentally-friendly activities such as recycling and improved waste disposal systems will have a positive effect on the global environment. Sadly though, without appropriate action this trend can come at the cost of workers’ lives and health.

 

For this reason, the 2012 world day for safety and health at work is on the theme of green jobs, with the intention of promoting safety and health in a green economy.

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Green jobs may cover activities such as work on non-carbon energy sites, manufacture and installation of solar panels, waste recycling, or work on contaminated sites. Workers may be exposed to a range of risks ranging from the old such as falls, for example during erection of wind turbines, to the new – exposure to materials that are novel to the work environment. There are physical, biological, chemical and psychosocial risks and with some of the work areas being new, not all enterprises may have appropriate health and safety management systems.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work has a multi-annual project on green jobs.

Risk anticipation is a major task of the Agency and in consultation with its tripartite stakeholders it is producing a series of scenarios to examine how work in the area of green jobs will develop and what occupational safety and health challenges this will bring (see interim reports Foresight of New and Emerging Risks to OSH Associated with New Technologies in Green Jobs by 2020 - Phase I: Key drivers of change and Phase II: Key technologies). This will showcase how foresight methodologies can be applied to safety and health policy- and decision-making. In parallel, follow-up work will be undertaken to explore in more depth high-risk green jobs, sectors, workers groups and/or technologies of particular relevance highlighted in the scenarios.

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The ILO celebrates the World Day for Safety and Health at Work on the 28 April to promote the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases globally. It is an awareness-raising campaign intended to focus international attention on emerging trends in the field of occupational safety and health and on the magnitude of work-related injuries, diseases and fatalities worldwide. The celebration of the World Day for Safety and Health at Work is an integral part of the Global Strategy on Occupational Safety and Health of the ILO and promotes the creation of a global preventative safety and health culture involving all stakeholders.

More information can be found on the ILO website

 

Read the ILO report Promoting safety and health in a green economy which highlights OSH as an integral part of the promotion of green jobs and a greener economy to achieve an economic and social development that is also environmentally sustainable.