, Patrycja Sołtysiak
https://doi.org/10.21697/zp.2023.23.4.07
A hazard is the opposite of security, being in the comfort zone, peace, certainty, and stability. The sense of security is one of the fundamental values of public and community life. If society’s essential, overriding and basic values, i.e. an individual’s health, life, healthy lifestyle, environment, and general well-being, are not properly protected or secured, they may turn into individual and collective hazards. Activities to counteract contemporary social hazards contribute to security. The individual citizen keeps a personal check on his or her security, or lack of, and threats to his or her security. The typology of global risks is certainly an open catalogue, which includes natural hazards which cause disasters, epidemics, pandemics of infectious diseases in humans and animals, technical failures related to man-made infrastructure, social conflicts (domestic and international) leading to war, terrorism, crime, poverty and unemployment in the broad sense of the term. In general, situations which are dangerous for society and the environment are initiated by the forces of nature or result from human activity.
In Polish law the doctrine on hazard covers a very broad range of situations. The reason why the term “hazard” is so ambiguous is because we understand security and the innumerable threats to it in a highly subjective way. Apart from our subjective perception of hazards in the world around us, we also rely on objective methods based on our knowledge, experience, the use of appropriate methods to test for risks, and try to keep an open mind to innovations and things we have not encountered before. A multidimensional, open view is important, because fear of the unknown, and of things which are new for us, have never been tried before, or which we may find difficult, can and often does bring a beneficial final result for the avoidance of risk, survival, and progress in many aspects of community life.
The history of civilization clearly shows that various types of hazard largely the result of destructive human activity, which is why the cooperation of international, national, government and non-governmental institutions is necessary, to improve mechanisms to protect interest: the individual and collective good against the new, more and more complex hazards we are facing today.
This paper considers only a small part of the complex subject of risks and hazards, but we hope it may contribute to the discussion on social security and help to identify not only the hazards we are already familiar with, but also ones which are just emerging.
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