Identifying hazards to include in risk analyses

Abstract

A risk analysis should provide decision makers with information regarding relevant hazards. The initiating phase, where the risk analysts identify hazards to be included in the risk analysis, lays the foundation for the rest of the analysis. This phase is, therefore, of great importance. In this paper, we examine how risk analysts in a municipal setting identified potential adverse events and how they chose which ones to analyse in the risk analysis. The municipalities under study had important similarities with respect to exposure to hazards and government regulation. With these similarities as a starting point and studying how the initiating phase took place, the paper focuses on impact regarding the uniformity of adverse events. Looking at events included in the Comprehensive Risk and vulnerability Analyses (CRAs), seems to reveal a predominance of uniformity. This is reasonable given the previously mentioned similarities. It is arguably also a result of many risk analysts using the same sources to retrieve ideas of potential hazards. The latter is alarming when considering risks not listed in these sources, like emergent or local risks.