Risk Analysis, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01578.x

From the Editors

On the next page, you will find a new featurecalled “Editor’s Choice.” In it, Area Editor ChuckHaas offers suggestions about the use of risk analy-sis to assess and manage global climate change. Wehope you enjoy these short essays by our editorialstaff, and that they will stir debates within the Soci-ety.

Whether expert probability judgments about at-tacker actions are useful for risk analysis has beenmuch discussed in this journal over the past year, con-tributing to a recent “Issue-Linked Paper Set” award.Gerald Brown and Tony Cox, Jr. present examplesto warn that using a defender’s information to as-sess attacker action probabilities, rather than mod-eling attacker actions based on information that theattacker has (which the defenders may not have),can lead to misguided allocations of defensive re-sources. In a letter, Ezell notes that Brown and Coxoverlook the fact that intelligence analysts alreadyconsider terrorist knowledge when assessing attackprobabilities. Brown and Cox respond that intelli-gence analysts cannot condition on knowledge thatthey do not have, and that this is a key reason for us-ing better analytics and risk analysis modeling overexpert probability judgments that may lack crucialinformation.

In another article about terrorism risk analysisfunded by the National Science Foundation, Bulleitand Drewek build and test an agent-based simulationmodel of terrorists and security agents to analyze ter-rorist attacks in a hypothetical community. The au-thors observe that attacks tend to occur primarily inplaces where wealth accumulates and passes through,such as transit stations.

Most of the other articles in this issue are aboutrisk perception, risk communications, and food secu-rity. Cloutier et al. examine parental risk perceptionsof child pedestrian injuries. The authors report an as-sociation between parental risk perceptions and pastexperiences, concerns about the danger of autos, and,notably, the sense of personal control in risk manage-ment. If the findings of this admittedly small sample

are replicated, then this study has implications for ef-forts to have more children walk, bike, or take schoolbuses.

We have published many articles about publicrisk perception, but few about worker perceptions.Ramona Hambach and colleagues conducted sevenfocus groups of workers in order to better understandtheir risk beliefs and communication challenges. Thearticle provides important insights, most prominentlythat workers feel that their concerns and suggestionsare ignored.

Cousin and Siegrist, supported by the GSM As-sociation and the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, ex-amined the impact of providing information to Swissresidents about risks associated with cell phonesand EMF from base stations. The information pack-ages increased public knowledge and decreased mis-perceptions, and recommendations in the materialshelped readers consider behavioral changes. Binderet al. examined the influence of interpersonal discus-sion on amplification or attenuation of risk percep-tions using a large sample from five midwestern andsouthern U.S. communities. The authors observedthat frequency of discussion predicted degree of am-plification or attenuation.

Food security has become a major topic in ourjournal, and this issue has three articles from Europe.The consumer phase model (CPM) of quantitativemicrobiological risk assessment (QMRA) focuses onthe part of the life cycle from consumer food pur-chase to exposure. Nauta and Christensen describethe difficulty of modeling this part of the cycle be-cause of wide variations in consumer food handlingpractices. The authors compared the performance ofeight published CPMs for Campylobacter in broilermeat. They observed that the estimates for mean in-gested dose, prevalence of exposure, and the proba-bility of illness per serving differ between CPMs, butstill are quite close together. The authors concludewith a policy implication discussion.

In order to predict individual exposure based onconsumption, bodyweight, and concentration data,

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Roelofs et al. present a non-parametric statisticalalternative to distribution data-based assumptions.They also present an NPI-Bayes hybrid method forcircumstances when credible distributional data areavailable.

Billoir and colleagues built a stochastic model toexamine the fate of Listeria Monocytogenes in dicedbacon during the manufacturing process. Their find-ings highlight the tumbling step as producing highrisk and as an opportunity to reduce risk. Hunteret al. present a quantitative microbial risk assessmentof the risk of Giardia and Cryptosporidium in verysmall private water supplies. The authors report es-timated infection risk to be higher than acceptablelevels, especially of Cryptosporidium.

Major areas of the Netherlands are vulnerable toflooding. Jonkman et al. examined government’s ef-forts to revise flood safety policies. They found rel-atively high levels of societal risk from flooding insouthwestern Netherlands and consider the policyimplications of their observations.

The issue ends with a provocative analysis of thepotential of using risk analysis to regulate polybromi-nated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a class of bromi-nated flame retardants. Much of our membership ad-vocates the use of risk assessment as the basis forlaws and regulations. MacGillivray et al. use PBDEto identify serious challenges to those who would userisk-based principles to set public policy.

Michael Greenberg and Karen Lowrie

Editor’s Choice

The Risk of Sustainability and the Sustainability ofRisk (Analysis)

The concept of sustainability has entered publicand scientific discourse over the last decade. It is use-ful to examine the intersections of this concept withthe field of risk analysis. I submit there are (at least)two such intersections worth pondering.

It is becoming increasingly clear that to mitigatethe effects of global climate change, major changesin policy, social systems, and/or technology, includ-ing such radical steps as “geoengineering,” will beneeded. Inevitably this will result in society incur-ring risks of various types, including errors in fore-casting the performance of such systems (many ofwhich may be coupled human-technological), fore-casting the resulting “state of nature,” and forecast-ing the resilience of such innovations to other forces.Risk analysts will need to combine tools in their tool-box with tools yet to be developed to help inform de-cision making in this response. The Society for RiskAnalysis has its roots in technological risk assess-ment of this type, and so would be a logical venuefor emerging discussions and developments.

The practices of risk analysis, particularly the as-sessment phase, have increasingly become formal-ized with a variety of frameworks, paradigms, andpractices. As the founding risk scientists are suc-ceeded by future generations, it will be necessaryto retain a culture that risk analysis is not only ascience with codes, frameworks, and paradigms, butan art, in which the appropriate tools of risk analy-sis are brought to bear in a manner commensuratewith the nature of the problems and decisions tobe analyzed. In essence we need a meta-paradigmof risk analysis that rather than prescribing partic-ular steps and checklists for all problems, outlinestypes of processes that may be undertaken, perhapsin a tiered format. In engineering, there is a well-understood phrase “best engineering judgment”; weperhaps need to develop a consensus about whatis the “best risk analytical judgment” (not leadingto a decision but leading to a set of analyses thatwould be most useful to decisionmakers and stake-holders under different circumstances). This wouldenable risk analysis to remain sustainable. Discussionabout the nature of this meta-paradigm would beworthy of SRA conference papers, and articles in thisjournal.

Charles N. Haas