Towards a coherent industrial safety and environmental risk management philosophy in the United Kingdom.

Abstract

Industrial risk management and pollution control strategies have been topics of active review in the UK during the past decade. Ultimate goals are the full accounting of the costs and benefits of remedial measures as a means of achieving more efficient and equitable decision processes, which are also transparent and reproducible. Considerable progress has been made in defining a coherent architecture for the management of human health risks, and analogous work is now underway in the environmental arena. Current and proposed approaches to the management of risk and the environment are based on constrained optimisation. That is, providing that risks or pollution loadings are within tolerable bounds, the aim is to achieve a reasonable balance between the costs of abatement measures and the benefits gained, with both expressed in monetary terms so far as this is possible. The same applies in the context of major accidents, though fundamental questions remain over the handling of societal risk.