title: Living and Future Tools for Risk Assessment-An Examination of the Possibilities for Fusion
Creators: name: Khodadadyan, Atousa
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2025

description: The process of risk assessment is crucial across a wide range of institutions, sectors and industries. Regulatory bodies worldwide are confronted with a plethora of challenges in assessing risks and uncertainties. The sources of those challenges are diverse, but all have a common association with the degree of confidence in predicting and quantifying risks. When the level of confidence is high, regulators tend to specify the outputs and take quantitatively informed preventive measures. However, when levels of confidence are lower, regulators may favour leaning towards more qualitative considerations of risks to concentrate on resilience building and absorption of the adverse consequences of risks. This challenge is also echoed by complex scientific risk assessment methods by generating more information which makes the process questionable about the ways of addressing issues such as multiple risks, multiple exposures, and sensitivity or susceptibility. In order to obtain a holistic approach to striking a balance between scientific, economics and safety measures, this thesis has employed a qualitative method to map and evaluate risk assessment methodologies and decision support tools used in regulatory agencies to: investigate and evaluate the main challenges associated with the implementation and practice of risk assessment and decision-making processes; investigate the range of presently in use risk assessment tools and techniques and evaluate their efficacy; assess the risk evaluation and decision-making strategies/criteria in regulatory agencies; examine the possibility for integration of social and natural science modes of risk assessment; and develop and validate a framework for facilitating future assessment of risk, tailored to the requirements of regulatory agencies. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 36 professionals and practitioners working in risk regulatory organisations from the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The results obtained from the study indicate that sources of identified challenges are not only related to the organisational factors, but they are also linked to rational, technical and expert parameters. This determined that assessing risk is an integrated and complex process founded on organisational, social, ethical, political and economic systems and mechanisms. The result of the study also specified that the selection and implementation of tools and techniques in risk identification and analysis are highly influenced by organisations’ characteristics and their field of activities, which can lead to dissimilar decision responses by regulatory agencies. Further, the study highlighted lack of consistency in risk assessment practices among risk regulatory agencies. It explained that the diversity of information, opinion, and actor perspectives are the key issues in risk evaluation and impact assessment amongst regulatory agencies. To address all the identified challenges within risk regulatory organisations, this study designed and developed the Enhanced Risk Assessment (ERA) framework to: support regulatory bodies to reflect on and conceptualise risk assessment in an integrative manner; determine the scope and limits of risk assessment processes; deliver more consistent and systematic risk analysis and evaluation; and transform underestimated or overestimated risk management plans to realistic approaches. This framework facilitates risk assessment and management through four stages; namely risk information, analysis, evaluation, and decision-making. It was tested and validated by experts in a number of regulatory agencies in the UK and EU.