title: Strategic risk appraisal. Comparing expert- and literature-informed consequence assessments for environmental policy risks receiving national attention.
abstract: Strategic risk appraisal (SRA) has been applied to compare diverse policy level risks to and from the environment in England and Wales. Its application has relied on expert-informed assessments of the potential consequences from residual risks that attract policy attention at the national scale. Here we compare consequence assessments, across environmental, economic and social impact categories that draw on 'expert'- and 'literature-based' analyses of the evidence for 12 public risks appraised by Government. For environmental consequences there is reasonable agreement between the two sources of assessment, with expert-informed assessments providing a narrower dispersion of impact severity and with median values similar in scale to those produced by an analysis of the literature. The situation is more complex for economic consequences, with a greater spread in the median values, less consistency between the two assessment types and a shift toward higher severity values across the risk portfolio. For social consequences, the spread of severity values is greater still, with no consistent trend between the severities of impact expressed by the two types of assessment. For the latter, the findings suggest the need for a fuller representation of socioeconomic expertise in SRA and the workshops that inform SRA output.
authors.affiliation: Cranfield University, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures, School of Water, Energy and Environment, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Jérôme
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dagonneau
authors.affiliation: Cranfield University, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures, School of Water, Energy and Environment, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, United Kingdom. Electronic address: s.rocks@cranfield.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Sophie A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Rocks
authors.affiliation: Cranfield University, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures, School of Water, Energy and Environment, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Prpich
authors.affiliation: Cranfield University, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures, School of Water, Energy and Environment, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kenisha
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Garnett
authors.affiliation: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Nobel House, 17 Smith Square, London, SW1P 3JR, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Edgar
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Black
authors.affiliation: Cranfield University, Cranfield Institute for Resilient Futures, School of Water, Energy and Environment, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Simon J T
authors.initials: SJT
authors.lastname: Pollard
keywords: Appraisal; Environment; Expert; Policy; Risk; Strategic