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Raising the Bar on Risk
Raising the Bar on Risk
Raising the Bar on Risk
The Risk Centre: providing the foresight needed to deal with challenges such as avian flu.
From storm surges to emerging diseases, natural and environmental risks need to be calculated if society is to manage them effectively. Since 2008, the Living With Environmental Change-accredited Risk Centre at Cranfield University has provided central government, local authorities and private industry with practical advice and guidance enabling them to mitigate risks, including many caused by environmental change.
“Everything we do is underpinned by strong science,” says Professor Simon Pollard, the Centre’s Director. “With that in place, we help organisations evaluate how likely it is that a particular event will occur and what its likely consequences would be. They can then decide what measures, if any, can or should be taken to reduce the risk or mitigate the potential consequences.”
To take one example, research supervised by the Risk Centre and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency is shedding light on the precise process by which a serious outbreak of a disease like bird flu might occur in the UK. The resulting insights will help inform risk management decisions taken by local authorities and other bodies with a frontline role to play in dealing with any outbreak.
For the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Centre has developed a new approach to strategic risk appraisal which could benefit other Government Departments too, and is currently evaluating the climate change adaptation strategies of over 100 companies.
“Any organisation’s ability to manage natural or manmade environmental risks depends on a host of technical, financial and other issues,” says Professor Pollard. “We help our clients work through those issues and arrive at the best possible decisions, for both the short and long term.”
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