Risk assessment
[1][3] More precisely, risk assessment identifies and analyses potential (future) events that may negatively impact individuals, assets, and/or the environment (i.e. hazard analysis).
[4][6] A systematic review from the Cochrane collaboration suggested "well-documented decision aids" are helpful in reducing effects of such tendencies or biases.
The agriculture, nuclear, aerospace, oil, chemical, railroad, and military industries have a long history of dealing with risk assessment.
[12] Mild risk follows normal or near-normal probability distributions, is subject to regression to the mean and the law of large numbers, and is therefore relatively predictable.
When risk assessment is used for public health or environmental decisions, the loss can be quantified in a common metric such as a country's currency or some numerical measure of a location's quality of life.
In quantitative risk assessment, an annualized loss expectancy (ALE) may be used to justify the cost of implementing countermeasures to protect an asset.
Barry Commoner, Brian Wynne and other critics have expressed concerns that risk assessment tends to be overly quantitative and reductive.
Some charge that assessments may drop out important non-quantifiable or inaccessible information, such as variations among the classes of people exposed to hazards, or social amplification.
[1] As of 2023, chemical risk assessment follows these 4 steps:[5] There is tremendous variability in the dose-response relationship between a chemical and human health outcome in particularly susceptible subgroups, such as pregnant women, developing fetuses, children up to adolescence, people with low socioeconomic status, those with preexisting diseases, disabilities, genetic susceptibility, and those with other environmental exposures.
Other emergencies occur where there is no previously planned protocol, or when an outsider group is brought in to handle the situation, and they are not specifically prepared for the scenario that exists but must deal with it without undue delay.
[20]Dynamic risk assessment is the final stage of an integrated safety management system that can provide an appropriate response during changing circumstances.
It relies on experience, training and continuing education, including effective debriefing to analyse not only what went wrong, but also what went right, and why, and to share this with other members of the team and the personnel responsible for the planning level risk assessment.
[25] Considering the increase in junk food and its toxicity, FDA required in 1973 that cancer-causing compounds must not be present in meat at concentrations that would cause a cancer risk greater than 1 in a million over a lifetime.
[26] The Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) supports a qualitative risk framework for public health protection from chemicals that display environmental and biological persistence, bioaccumulation, toxicity (PBT) and long range transport; most global chemicals that meet this criterion have been previously assessed quantitatively by national and international health agencies.
[citation needed] Stringent requirements of 1 in a million may not be technologically feasible or may be so prohibitively expensive as to render the risk-causing activity unsustainable, resulting in the optimal degree of intervention being a balance between risks vs.
[citation needed] In the context of public health, risk assessment is the process of characterizing the nature and likelihood of a harmful effect to individuals or populations from certain human activities.
[32] The six types of hazards to be aware of are safety (those that can cause injury), chemicals, biological, physical, psychosocial (those that cause stress, harassment) and ergonomic (those that can cause musculoskeletal disorders).
Local knowledge remains unavoidable to understand the hazards that threaten individual communities, the critical thresholds in which they turn into disasters, for the validation of hydraulic models, and in the decision-making process on risk reduction.
On the other hand, local knowledge alone is not enough to understand the impacts of future changes and climatic variability and to know the areas exposed to infrequent hazards.
The availability of new technologies and open access information (high resolution satellite images, daily rainfall data) allow assessment today with an accuracy that only 10 years ago was unimaginable.
The images taken by unmanned vehicle technologies allow to produce very high resolution digital elevation models and to accurately identify the receptors.
Despite these potentials, the risk assessment is not yet integrated into the local planning in the South of the Sahara which, in the best of cases, uses only the analysis of vulnerability to climate change and variability.
Part of risk management incorporates threat and vulnerability analyses and considers mitigations provided by security controls planned or in place.
[clarification needed] In July 2010, shipping companies agreed to use standardized procedures in order to assess risk in key shipboard operations.
Higher levels of risk may be acceptable in special circumstances, such as military or search and rescue operations when there is a chance of recovering a survivor.
[55][56] In recreational scuba diving, the extent of risk assessment expected of the diver is relatively basic and is included in the pre-dive checks.
Outdoor education, wilderness adventure, and other outdoor-related organizations should, and are in some jurisdictions required, to conduct risk assessments prior to offering programs for commercial purposes.
[66] Ecological risk assessment is complicated by the fact that there are many nonchemical stressors that substantially influence ecosystems, communities, and individual plants and animals, as well as across landscapes and regions.
[68][69] Defining the undesired (adverse) event is a political or policy judgment, further complicating applying traditional risk analysis tools to ecological systems.
Regional and national protocols have been proposed by multiple academic or governmental institutions and working groups,[71] but global standards such as the Red List of Threatened Species and the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems have been widely adopted, and are recognized or proposed as official indicators of progress toward international policy targets and goals, such as the Aichi targets and the Sustainable Development Goals.
