Abstract:
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.
