Presenting the Swedish fire safety regulations in Hong Kong

Today was the start of 9th International Conference on Performance-Based Codes and Fire Safety Design Methods in Hong Kong. SFPE is hosting the conference at hotel Excelsior.

Hong Kong by night just outside my hotel.

I was presenting together with my former colleague, Caroline Cronsioe, who works at Boverket/The National Board of Housing Building and Planning. We also have two co-authors, David Tonegran from Tyréns and Henrik Bjelland from University of Stavanger.

The topic of the paper is the new Swedish building regulations that were implemented

Link to our paper

Link to our presentation

Some reflections after today is that several countries have mixed experience with performance-based design (PFD). Low competence among regulators may rule out that possibility - prescriptive is more well known. In other cases lack of guidance has led to varying and insufficient fire safety. Give the same problem to ten fire safety engineers and you'll have ten different answers.

This is one reason to why countries such as New Zealand and Sweden starts "prescribing" design values and criteria. There's obvious parallels of structural safety where design loads and resistance have been set nationally for years. It's quite reasonable in my opinion that we set the societal risk level nationally. Compare with road safety where speed limits are natural today but weren't implemented until risk awareness grew. However, more work will be needed on calibration of risk levels for fire safety. Here, international collaboration is welcome - and the conference is an arena for discussing such ideas.