Risk Analysis, Decision Analysis, Causal Analysis, and Economics: A Personal Perspective from More Than 40 years Experience

Abstract

I entered the field of risk analysis forty years ago from a background in physics followed by doctoral training and experience in decision analysis. I came into the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) after participating as a committee member in the 1983 National Academies report, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process. The insights and recommendations from this report, and successor reports from 1996 and 2008, merit revisiting on this 40th anniversary. Risk analysis includes risk assessment, a process of summarizing applicable science to inform decisions; and risk management, a process of making informed choices, usually involving multiple stakeholders. Inherent in both is the need to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and differing perspectives and goals. The lessons I have learned include the need for a conceptual separation of risk management from risk assessment, the benefit of an iterative dialogue between these activities, and the wisdom of articulating and assessing what we know, what we want, and what we can do as we seek to understand and manage risks affecting ourselves and those we advise.

Examining Evidence of Benefits and Risks for Pasteurizing Donor Breastmilk

“…Raw breastmilk and other foods containing a natural microbiota appear to contribute to GI, immune, neural, and respiratory system health for infants and adults. The workshop could launch a series of exercises of an analytic-deliberative process [67,68] to build shared understanding between experts and stakeholders in support of evidence-based risk management decisions on donor milk and other foods.…”

“…The danger of managing risks while ignorant of confounded causal factors for benefits and risks is that interventions (e.g., pasteurization) may not reduce risk as intended, but may actually increase risk and reduce benefits [69]. Societal barriers to maximizing health benefits for NICU infants may also include difficulties in shifting paradigms for 'entrenched bureaucratic practice and a highly successful advertising campaign supporting the old paradigm' [68].…”

“…Further, urgent needs for greater transparency with stakeholders about the available data, more robust analysis using appropriate methods of inferencing, and exercise of analytic-deliberative process [68], as noted in the quotation below, also apply to future deliberations about evidence for the raw breastmilk ecosystem.…”

Nourishing the Human Holobiont to Reduce the Risk of Non-Communicable Diseases: A Cow’s Milk Evidence Map Example

“…Our evidence map work is intended to increase transparency about the recent bodies of evidence regarding the controversial issues around milk pasteurization and more importantly, to improve transparency in public discourse about the evidence on raw milks, promote research to fill data gaps for risk assessment, and enable development of evidence-based regulations and policies that balance benefits and risks in the near future. Together, these two evidence maps are envisioned as the foundation, the scientific basis, for an international workshop to launch a series of exercises of analytic-deliberative process [111,112] around the world planned for this project in future years.…”

Forty Years of Risk Analysis: A Scientometric Overview

“…Johnson and Swedlow (2021) reviewed the contributions of cultural theory to risk research, whereas Siegrist and Árvai (2020) and Balog‐Way, McComas, and Besley (2020) reflected on the research areas of risk perception and risk communication, respectively. Other authors provided retrospective perspectives on aspects at the nexus between risk analysis and decision making, with Webler and Tuler (2021) reflecting on evidence about and future prospects of public participation in risk decision making, Bier (2020) reviewing and commenting on the role of decision analysis in risk analysis, and North (2020) providing a perspective on the relations between risk analysis, decision analysis, causal analysis, and economics based on extensive personal experience. Reviews of the 40‐year research history focusing on specific risk‐related topics include the work by Gould (2021) on organizational risk management, and that of Wu and Rodricks (2020) on food safety risk assessment.…”