Societal insights in risk communication planning – a structured approach

Abstract

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) receives hundreds of requests for scientific risk assessments each year and publishes on average over 500 scientific outputs annually. To optimise the planning for its risk communications, the authors developed a two-phase approach for assessing incoming requests that follows the first two stages of the IRGC’s Risk Governance Framework―Pre-Assessment (Screening) and Appraisal (Risk Perceptions and Social Concerns Assessment)―and is driven by use of social insights, analytics, and professional knowledge. During the Pre-Assessment phase requests from risk managers are pre-screened and filtered then processed using a checklist divided into sections on the characteristics of risks, knowledge/awareness of them, and the institutional and market context. A decision tree was developed to manage the combinations of factors needed to trigger preparation for future risk communications options. Use of the approach was implemented and refined at EFSA from 2019 to 2021. During the Appraisal phase, societal insights from social research, media analysis and social media listening are compiled to i) map the elements to consider for risk communication and ii) identify the overall sensitivity of the subject matter, taking into account concerns, expectations and risk perceptions. These assessments of risk perception and societal concerns have been developed for sensitive topics and potentially emerging issues with the aim of identifying risks that share similar characterises, in terms of level of knowledge and risk perception. These two stages provide mechanisms to identify topics and clusters of topics of interest for risk communication and to drive the subsequent development of communication objectives and strategies. This is expected to inform the eventual development of standardised communication responses on topics within specific clusters.