Summary Risk Society

Remi Verhoeven
September 20, 2010

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Introduction to ’The Risk Society’
Risk; a chance of a negative consequence (possible but not certain); the prob-
ability of a harmful event; the expected disvalue. The process of risk can be-
visualised by a ’hazard – exposure – vulnerability’ scheme. Changing either
of these factors alters the probability of the harmful event. The uncertain-
ties in these factors can be caused by known unknowns(aleatory-) or unknown
unknowns(epistemic uncertainty). Randomness (variability) in the physical pro-
cess modeled in a Probabilistic Risk Assesment (PRA) proposes the use of
probabilistic (aleatory) models.

• aleatory uncertainty – those that stem from variability in known popula-

tions.
• epistemic uncertainty – basic lack of knowledge about fundamental phe-
nomena.

pre-assesment / methodology
hazard source (product or process) + primary harms (f.e. death, injury or
damage) or secondary harms (others). 1
1 assignment: To be made into a presentation held on 11/10 by 1 or 2 people. A nice idea

might be: rise and fall of social media. Is there a reason for holding a risk assesment?
The degree of voluntarity makes a risk more or less acceptable.

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NASA: Risk Assesment I
The concept of risk includes both undesirable consequences, the number of peo-
ple harmed and the probability of occurances of this harm. NASA has adopted
the Continous Risk Management (CRM) process. The disposition of all un-
acceptable risks shall take place before the delivery. Risk management involves
prevention of adverse scenarios and promotion of favorable scenarios. To accom-
plish this, risk assesments are being done. A risk informed resource allocation
requires indentification and quantification of all risk-significant scenarios. Risk
analysis gives a quantitative estimate of risk, a potential risk reduction measure
indintification, and the quantification of potential benefits of these prevention
measures. The model created must reach a level of detail at which data are
available to support quantification of the model’s parameters. Failure rates are
typically uncertain, sometimes because failure information is spare or unavail-
able, and sometimes because unaplicability might be in doubt. The sampling
process is the method most widly used for determining the uncertainty in the
output risk metric.

CRM activities
• identify
• analyze
• plan
• track
• control
• communicate and document
Within the description of the CRM they talk about ’acceptable risk’ and define
it as follows:
Characterization of a primary risk as ”acceptable” is supported by
the rationale that all reasonable prevention and mitigation options
(within cost, schedule, and technical constraints) have been insti-
tuted.
This makes me wonder of the risk acceptance when the scheduel is tight is
similar to the risk acceptance when it is not.

risk-informed
Decision making based on risk analysis alone is not the approach they choose.
Risk is only one of 5 principles to govern a change. Other principles are; regu-
lation, defence-in-depth philosophy, safety margins, and preformance measure-
ment strategies.

individual risk
The risk management aproach of the UK healt and Satefy Executive is based
on a range of individual risk, or annual probability of death. The range is
divided in to three regions; broadly acceptable (up to 10−6 ), tolerable (10−6 to
10−3 /10−4 ) and unacceptable (workers 10−3 , public 10−4 ). This brings up the
question if the time span asociated with the death is of no importance.

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Risk Appraisal
Risk appraisal includes two major components; the science assessment of risk
to human health and the environment, and the scientific assessment of related
concerns, as well as social and economic implications. Social scientists identify
and alayse the issues that individuals or society as a whole link with a certain
risk. This is a big difference between the book by O.Renn and the NASA report.
After this also political mobilization is intersting together with social responses.

Risk Assesment
The purpose of risk assessment is the generation of knowledge linking specific
risk agents with uncertain but possible consequences. It contains three core
components:
• identification and, if possible, estimation of hazard;
• assessment of exposure and/or vulnerability;
• estimation of risk, combining the likelihood and the severity of the targeted
consequences based on the identified hazardous characteristics and the
exposure/vulnerability assesment.
There are five methods of calculating risk probability, based on past prefor-
mance, a similar risk source or on an experimental intervention:
• actuarial extrapolation (collection of statistical data relating to prefor-
mace)
• probailistic risk assessment (collection of statistical data relating to com-
ponents of hazardous agent or tech.)
• probabilistic modelling (epidemiological or experimental studies to find
statistical correlations between exposure and adverse effects)
• estimate probabilities (by experts or decision-makers)
• worst and best case estimated likelihood for all concequences

Challenges
Since risks are mental models, the quality of their explanatory power depends
upon the accuracy and vaildity of their (real) predictions. Unlike some other
scientific constructs, validating the results of risk assessments is particularly
difficult because, in theorym one would need to wait indefinitely to prove that
the probabilities assigned to a specific outcome were correctly assessed.
To dinstinguishe between the key components of uncertainty, the following cat-
egories appear to be an appropriate means:

• target variability
• systematic and random error in modelling
• indeterminacy or genuine stochastic effects
• system boundaries
• ignorance or non-knowledge