Unpleasant surprises and controversies are an important part of the job for people who work in environmental protection and public health. Uncertainties that arise in assessing a hazard and uncertainties about capabilities for managing it make that part of the job difficult and in situations of high uncertainty such difficulties are particularly acute. Over the past 30 years there have been a wide array of successful developments in risk assessment, risk management and risk communication. Many of these have been directed at better analysis of uncertainties, better management that takes uncertainty into account, and better-informed stakeholder participation in decision making. This project takes an exploratory approach to look at these developments in contexts of high uncertainty. The first working assumption is that situations of high uncertainty severely stress even the new capabilities in hazard assessment and in hazard management and that high uncertainty has strong effects on societal response. Better understanding of these stresses and impacts in specific contexts and an effort to develop more adaptive approaches that link evolving assessment capabilities to management decisions offer promise for making significant improvements in assessment and management. We also intend to explore a stronger assumption: that a transforming perspective in which uncertainty is regarded as a key part of the assessment and management problem to be dealt with directly rather than as an unfortunate aspect of the analysis could facilitate such improvements.
The project approach is both exploratory and comparative. It will examine uncertain situations at three levels of detail. The project will survey and classify the state of knowledge for a broad range of hazards and explore possible classifications of uncertain situations in terms relating to assessment, management, and public response challenges. The project will explore with practitioners the feasibility of detailed work in five challenge cases of high uncertainty: unregulated chemicals, extreme sea level rise, health hazards (if any) from electromagnetic fields, terrorist acts, and emerging diseases. We will perform a detailed case study including one or two workshops with practitioners on radioactive waste management. Project products include a set of findings and recommendations for more in depth study of highly uncertain risks; we also anticipate eliciting useful findings and policy recommendations on radioactive waste management and will evaluate the suitability of our practitioner workshop approach to improving the discussion of radioactive waste management. More broadly, the project plans call for the exploration of opportunities to develop and disseminate educational modules appropriate to addressing highly uncertain situations.
