Abstract
Strategic risk appraisal (SRA) has been applied to compare diverse policy level risks to and from the environment in England and Wales. Its application has relied on expert-informed assessments of the potential consequences from residual risks that attract policy attention at the national scale. Here we compare consequence assessments, across environmental, economic and social impact categories that draw on ‘expert’- and ‘literature-based’ analyses of the evidence for 12 public risks appraised by Government. For environmental consequences there is reasonable agreement between the two sources of assessment, with expert-informed assessments providing a narrower dispersion of impact severity and with median values similar in scale to those produced by an analysis of the literature. The situation is more complex for economic consequences, with a greater spread in the median values, less consistency between the two assessment types and a shift toward higher severity values across the risk portfolio. For social consequences, the spread of severity values is greater still, with no consistent trend between the severities of impact expressed by the two types of assessment. For the latter, the findings suggest the need for a fuller representation of socioeconomic expertise in SRA and the workshops that inform SRA output.
Highlights
IntroductionIn Strategic risk appraisal (SRA), risks of varying character (Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1998; Klinke and Renn, 2002; Pollard et al, 2004; Prpich et al, 2011) are appraised alongside one another and presented in a comparative analysis, often in a single schematic or ‘heat map’ (Prpich et al, 2013)
Notwithstanding efforts to secure a representative make-up of technical expertise in Strategic risk appraisal (SRA) workshops, there has been little a priori analysis of whether the assessments garnered by them correlate with those gained from a more considered, albeit lengthy, analysis of the evidence for the same risks from the published literature. This paper attempts such an analysis and seeks to validate, or otherwise, the use of expert-informed SRA; our null hypothesis being ‘there is no significant difference between literature- and expert-informed assessments of the environmental risks that attract national attention in SRA’
We address the hypothesis ‘there is no significant difference between literature- and expert-informed assessments of the environmental risks that attract national attention in SRA’ and explored reasons for comparison and significant difference across environmental, economic and social categories of residual impact for 12 public risks
Summary
In SRAs, risks of varying character (Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1998; Klinke and Renn, 2002; Pollard et al, 2004; Prpich et al, 2011) are appraised alongside one another and presented in a comparative analysis, often in a single schematic or ‘heat map’ (Prpich et al, 2013) This differs markedly from conventional environmental risk assessments where the analyst is concerned with estimating the likelihood of an adverse outcome (usually) in a spatiotemporal context; say the inhalation risk associated with emissions from a hazardous waste incinerator; or of hydrocarbon exposures to workers remediating a parcel of petroleumcontaminated land (see Defra, 2011 for examples)
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