Scientific commentary: Strategic analysis of environmental policy risks-heat maps, risk futures and the character of environmental harm

We summarise our recent efforts on the policy level risk appraisal of environmental risks. These have necessitated working closely with policy teams and a requirement to maintain crisp and accessible messages for policy audiences. Our comparative analysis uses heat maps, supplemented with risk narratives, and employs the multidimensional character of risks to inform debates on the management of current residual risk and future threats. The policy research and ensuing analysis raises core issues about how comparative risk analyses are used by policy audiences, their validation and future developments that are discussed in the commentary below

Strategic risk appraisal. Comparing expert- and literature-informed consequence assessments for environmental policy risks receiving national attention

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

Validating the strategic risk appraisals of policy experts

The emergence and evolution of environmental risks increases the need of government organisations to prioritise their resources for efficient risk management in a manner that is transparent and auditable. Many different data sources (including expert opinion and published data) can be used to inform assessments. This work evaluates and compares the use of two different data sources for environmental strategic risk assessment (SRA). Here, a developed SRA framework (Prpich et al., 2012) was applied to 12 environmental risks within the UK to characterise the environmental, economic and social impacts of a risk on semi-qualitative scales and provide a descriptive narrative. A structured literature search of peer-reviewed and grey literature was assessed for relevance and quality and impact values were determined giving equal weighting to evidence. It was not possible to identify likelihood data from the literature evidence, therefore the expert assessment was used for all risks. Individual assessments for the different risks were compared to expert elicitation data (n ≥ 3) where it was found that they provided similar risk assessments and referred to similar evidence. Where the assessments differed, differences in evidence were noted possibly due to publication delays or method rigidity. Knowledge gaps were noted in the assessment of ‘economic services’ and ‘social cohesion’ sub-attributes for both data sources. These results suggest that the expert elicitation validated the use of literature evidence for SRAs impact assessment, but in order to provide a robust SRA, future assessments could combine both evidence sources