How do we decide which risks to mitigate and which to accept?
This was the theme in a recent workshop led by ResOrgs, where national-level organisations and agencies, including us, gathered to talk risk tolerance.
ResOrgs has just released a report summarising the workshop, which highlights the challenges and opportunities in evaluating and applying risk tolerance, including:
- varied risk literacy and perceptions
- understanding and accounting for different decision-making
- environments and behaviours
- how to evaluate risk tolerance
- appropriately translating risk tolerance into policy and practice.
Priorities for advancing risk tolerance approaches across policy, practice and research included:
- the need for a nationally agreed societal risk tolerance framework that can be adapted to context-specific guidance
- understanding Te Ao Māori perspectives on risk tolerance
- the need for a community of practice on risk tolerance to share tools, skills, lessons, and experience.
The report provides a summary of the workshop, the case studies presented, and the challenges and priorities identified by participants. A small working group is now working together to turn the priorities identified in the workshop into action.
This work is important because, while New Zealand has well-established approaches for evaluating natural hazard risk, we lack a nationally agreed approach for assessing our risk tolerance and applying that to our risk management decisions.