Courtesy: Risk Assessment service
Dynamic risk assessment
During an emergency response, the situation and hazards are often inherently less predictable than for planned activities (non-linear). In general, if the situation and hazards are predictable (linear), standard operating procedures should deal with them adequately. In some emergencies, this may also hold true, with the preparation and trained responses being adequate to manage the situation. In these situations, the operator can manage risk without outside assistance, or with the assistance of a backup team who are prepared and available to step in at short notice.
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. Examples include police, fire department, disaster response, and other public service rescue teams. In these cases, ongoing risk assessment by the involved personnel can advise appropriate action to reduce risk. HM Fire Services Inspectorate has defined dynamic risk assessment (DRA) as:
The continuous assessment of risk in the rapidly changing circumstances of an operational incident, in order to implement the control measures necessary to ensure an acceptable level of safety.
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.
Fields of application
The application of risk assessment procedures is common in a wide range of fields, and these may have specific legal obligations, codes of practice, and standardised procedures. Some of these are listed here.
Human settlements
The importance of risk assessments to manage the consequences of climate change and variability is recalled in the global frameworks for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), adopted by the member countries of the United Nations at the end of the World Conferences held in Kobe (2005) and Sendai (2015). The Sendai framework for DRR brings attention to the local scale and encourages a holistic risk approach, which should consider all the hazards to which a community is exposed, the integration of technical-scientific knowledge with local knowledge, and the inclusion of the concept of risk in local plans to achieve a significant disaster reduction by 2030. Taking these principles into daily practice poses a challenge for many countries. The Sendai framework for DRR monitoring system highlights how little we know about the progress made over the past five years in local disaster risk reduction.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Exceptions aside, in the South of the Sahara, risk assessment is not yet an institutionalized practice. The exposure of human settlements to multiple hazards (hydrological and agricultural drought, pluvial, fluvial and coastal floods) is frequent and requires risk assessments on a regional, municipal, and sometimes individual human settlement scale. The multidisciplinary approach and the integration of local and technical-scientific knowledge are necessary from the first steps of the assessment. 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. Based on this information, the hydraulic models allow the identification of flood areas with precision even at the scale of small settlements. The information on loss and damages and on cereal crop at individual settlement scale allow to determine the level of multi-hazard risk on a regional scale. The multi-temporal high-resolution satellite images allow to assess the hydrological drought and the dynamics of human settlements in the flood zone. Risk assessment is much more than an aid to informed decisions making about risk reduction or acceptance. It integrates early warning systems by highlighting the hot spots where disaster prevention and preparedness are most urgent. When risk assessment considers the dynamics of exposure over time, it helps to identify risk reduction policies that are more appropriate to the local context. 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.
General health
There are many resources that provide health risk information.
The National Library of Medicine provides risk assessment and regulation information tools for a varied audience. These include:
- TOXNET (databases on hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases),
- the Household Products Database (potential health effects of chemicals in over 10,000 common household products),
- TOXMAP (maps of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund and Toxics Release Inventory data).
The United States Environmental Protection Agency provides basic information about environmental health risk assessments for the public for a wide variety of possible environmental exposures.
The Environmental Protection Agency began actively using risk assessment methods to protect drinking water in the United States after the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. The law required the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on drinking water issues, and in its report, the NAS described some methodologies for doing risk assessments for chemicals that were suspected carcinogens, recommendations that top EPA officials have described as perhaps the study’s most important part.
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. The US Environmental Protection Agency provides extensive information about ecological and environmental risk assessments for the public via its risk assessment portal. 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 criteria have been previously assessed quantitatively by national and international health agencies.