Transparency in Europe: A Quantitative Study

In recent years, European pharmaceutical regulators have increasingly committed to heightening access to raw safety‐related data as part of a wave of transparency initiatives (e.g., providing public Internet‐mediated access to clinical trials data). Yet, the regulators—who are under significant pressure—have not yet benefited from a systematic review of this new policy. In seeking to inject much needed evidence, this article explores the effects of new transparency policies designed to promote meaningful communication of risks and benefits to patients. Results of a cross‐national European survey with respondents from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Germany, and Sweden (N = 5,648) shed light on how patients and the public are likely to react to the regulators’ new transparency policies. The findings demonstrate clear national variations in how European citizens are likely to react and emphasize the need to develop evidence‐based, reasoned transparency policies that integrate benefit‐risk communication. The authors conclude by providing six specific recommendations, informed by the study, that seek to improve the European transparency model both within the medical field and across health, safety, and environmental policy domains.     

Portfolio Analysis of Layered Security Measures

Layered defenses are necessary for protecting the public from terrorist attacks. Designing a system of such defensive measures requires consideration of the interaction of these countermeasures. In this article, we present an analysis of a layered security system within the lower Manhattan area. It shows how portfolios of security measures can be evaluated through portfolio decision analysis. Consideration is given to the total benefits and costs of the system. Portfolio diagrams are created that help communicate alternatives among stakeholders who have differing views on the tradeoffs between security and economic activity.     

Has Successful Terror Gone to Ground?

This article considers all 87 attacks worldwide against air and rail transport systems that killed at least two passengers over the 30‐year period of 1982–2011. The data offer strong and statistically significant evidence that successful acts of terror have “gone to ground” in recent years: attacks against aviation were concentrated early in the three decades studied whereas those against rail were concentrated later. Recent data are used to make estimates of absolute and comparative risk for frequent flyers and subway/rail commuters. Point estimates in the “status quo” case imply that mortality risk from successful acts of terror was very low on both modes of transportation and that, whereas risk per trip is higher for air travelers than subway/rail commuters, the rail commuters experience greater risk per year than the frequent flyers.     

Paradoxes of risk management: Social responsibility and self-exclusion in Dutch casinos

This article deals with the basic contradictions of risk management and responsibility regarding problem gambling and self-exclusions, and draws special attention to the role knowledge production and science play in the construction and evaluation of gambling risks. This remarkable case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is analyzed from a risk-governance perspective. It is grounded on a case study of the CSR practice of the Dutch casino monopoly, in particular the problem gambling mitigation and self-exclusion program of this corporation. The intentions and operations of this ‘responsible gambling’ practice constitute new business values and working norms. At the same time empirical evaluations of the self-exclusion program reveal that despite all the efforts put in the risk-management strategies, a significant part of the problem cannot be addressed at all. This points toward a major paradox of risk management. Overall the article highlights the ambiguous nature of risk management and responsible gambling.     

Spatial Distribution of Flood Risk and Quality of Spatial Management: Case Study in Odra Valley,Poland

This article presents methodological solutions aimed at presenting the spatial distribution of flood risk and quality of spatial management (land use), indicating both those areas used reasonably and those requiring modification. The purpose was to identify key risk areas and risk‐free areas from the point of view of human security and activity on the floodplains, based on the examples of the vicinities of Wroclaw and Raciborz in the Odra Valley, Poland. Due to recent climate change, Poland has suffered the effects of severe flooding (e.g., 1997, 2001, 2010). The analyses conducted were motivated by the European Parliament and Council's recently implemented Directive 2007/60/WE, as well as by the demand for studies for local spatial planning. The analysis indicates that reasonably developed areas do not account for the majority of those studied, making up 36% of the Wroclaw area and 15% of the Raciborz area.     

Assessing Major Accident Risks to Support Land‐Use Planning Using a Severity‐Vulnerability Combination Method: A Case Study in Dagushan Peninsula,China

Major accident risks posed by chemical hazards have raised major social concerns in today's China. Land‐use planning has been adopted by many countries as one of the essential elements for accident prevention. This article aims at proposing a method to assess major accident risks to support land‐use planning in the vicinity of chemical installations. This method is based on the definition of risk by the Accidental Risk Assessment Methodology for IndustrieS (ARAMIS) project and it is an expansion application of severity and vulnerability assessment tools. The severity and vulnerability indexes from the ARAMIS methodology are employed to assess both the severity and vulnerability levels, respectively. A risk matrix is devised to support risk ranking and compatibility checking. The method consists of four main steps and is presented in geographical information‐system‐based maps. As an illustration, the proposed method is applied in Dagushan Peninsula, China. The case study indicated that the method could not only aid risk regulations on existing land‐use planning, but also support future land‐use planning by offering alternatives or influencing the plans at the development stage, and thus further enhance the roles and influence of land‐use planning in the accident prevention activities in China.     

Understanding Gaps Between the Risk Perceptions of Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI) Residents and Wildfire Professionals

Research across a variety of risk domains finds that the risk perceptions of professionals and the public differ. Such risk perception gaps occur if professionals and the public understand individual risk factors differently or if they aggregate risk factors into overall risk differently. The nature of such divergences, whether based on objective inaccuracies or on differing perspectives, is important to understand. However, evidence of risk perception gaps typically pertains to general, overall risk levels; evidence of and details about mismatches between the specific level of risk faced by individuals and their perceptions of that risk is less available. We examine these issues with a paired data set of professional and resident assessments of parcel‐level wildfire risk for private property in a wildland–urban interface community located in western Colorado, United States. We find evidence of a gap between the parcel‐level risk assessments of a wildfire professional and numerous measures of residents’ risk assessments. Overall risk ratings diverge for the majority of properties, as do judgments about many specific property attributes and about the relative contribution of these attributes to a property's overall level of risk. However, overall risk gaps are not well explained by many factors commonly found to relate to risk perceptions. Understanding the nature of these risk perception gaps can facilitate improved communication by wildfire professionals about how risks can be mitigated on private lands. These results also speak to the general nature of individual‐level risk perception.     

Risk‐Cost‐Benefit Analysis for Transportation Corridors with Interval Uncertainties of Heterogeneous Data

Access management, which systematically limits opportunities for egress and ingress of vehicles to highway lanes, is critical to protect trillions of dollars of current investment in transportation. This article addresses allocating resources for access management with incomplete and partially relevant data on crash rates, travel speeds, and other factors. While access management can be effective to avoid crashes, reduce travel times, and increase route capacities, the literature suggests a need for performance metrics to guide investments in resource allocation across large corridor networks and several time horizons. In this article, we describe a quantitative decision model to support an access management program via risk‐cost‐benefit analysis under data uncertainties from diverse sources of data and expertise. The approach quantifies potential benefits, including safety improvement and travel time savings, and costs of access management through functional relationships of input parameters including crash rates, corridor access point densities, and traffic volumes. Parameter uncertainties, which vary across locales and experts, are addressed via numerical interval analyses. This approach is demonstrated at several geographic scales across 7,000 kilometers of highways in a geographic region and several subregions. The demonstration prioritizes route segments that would benefit from risk management, including (i) additional data or elicitation, (ii) right‐of‐way purchases, (iii) restriction or closing of access points, (iv) new alignments, (v) developer proffers, and (vi) etc. The approach ought to be of wide interest to analysts, planners, policymakers, and stakeholders who rely on heterogeneous data and expertise for risk management.     

Whither Risk Assessment: New Challenges and Opportunities a Third of a Century After the Red Book

Six multi‐decade‐long members of SRA reflect on the 1983 Red Book in order to examine the evolving relationship between risk assessment and risk management; the diffusion of risk assessment practice to risk areas such as homeland security and transportation; the quality of chemical risk databases; challenges from other groups to elements at the core of risk assessment practice; and our collective efforts to communicate risk assessment to a diverse set of critical groups that do not understand risk, risk assessment, or many other risk‐related issues. The authors reflect on the 10 recommendations in the Red Book and present several pressing challenges for risk assessment practitioners.     

Risk Policies in the United States: Definition and Characteristics Based on a Scoping Review of the Literature

The concept of “risk policy” is used with increasing frequency by decisionmakers, researchers, and the media. However, there is no precise, generally accepted definition of what is covered by policies in this area. Based on a scoping review of the literature published in key journals in the sector, we have identified the main characteristics of public risk policies drawn up and implemented in the United States. The sample comprised 21 articles published in six multidisciplinary journals between 2000 and 2010.