"The risk society: how to manage the insecurities of the future?" | "A bad luck" that calls for action

"Now more than ever it is particularly important to have confidence in the future", this was how the President of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Isabel Capeloa Gil opened the conference "The risk society: how to manage the insecurities of the future?", organised by the newspaper Público and held this Monday at the headquarters of the UCP.

According to the President, "in face of what our projections were at the beginning of the year 2000, of the conquest, through knowledge, of diseases such as disease, poverty and war, today we know that none of this is reality.

In the PSuperior Talks session, the threats of today's society were discussed, such as war in Europe, pandemic, environmental threats, energy crisis, inflation and high interest rates, but also the tools and strategies used to manage the uncertainties of the future.

Uncertainties that according to sociologist André Santos Pereira "did not begin with modern societies", explaining that "it was during post-modernism that the awareness of the existence of risk was born and, along with it, the concern about whether we are able to deal with it and to condition it in our daily action".

But if the issue was already "vast and complex" before, as referred by Sónia Sapage, Público's executive editor, the war in Ukraine "increased even more the context of uncertainty" existing in a context of post-pandemic recovery that happened "unevenly", said Joana Silva. The professor of the Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics of the UCP noted that "if on the one hand there was a European stimulus and a desire to improve, on the other hand there is still a very long pre-crisis trajectory of low growth, which we needed to break".

Joana Silva pointed out that the current situation "is even more costly for young people who finish their degree during the recession, as they tend to have much lower entry salaries and continue on a much worse salary trajectory than young people who enter in a good year for the economy". "A bad luck that lasts ten years," the lecturer concluded.

Whereas the student of the master's degree in Communication Sciences of the Faculty of Human Sciences, of the UCP, Pedro Isidoro Silva, stressed that the "constant changes" make it impossible to make projections for the future. "We stop making plans", said the student, adding that " at the level of employment there is no possibility of making projections, because we don't know if there could be a crisis. At the geopolitical level, we have already seen that it is not worth it, we came out of a pandemic, which we never thought we would have, and we entered a war and we don't know what will happen."

The panel discussion on "the risk society", also counted with the participation of cybersecurity specialist Jéssica Domingues, who spoke about the risks that "before could be summarised merely to physical issues" and that now "are extended to the cyber world".

According to the specialist "more and more our life depends on the digital", and therefore it has become "very difficult to map which are the limits of the Internet and apply mitigation and control measures".

An issue that according to Pedro Isidoro Silva has been debated in the academia, where "students are guided to develop quality information projects".