Risk Response to Environmental Hazards to Health – Towards an Ecological Approach

Response to risks can be seen as an ecological process, involving a community of actors whose perceptions and actions play off each other, and whose responses help to determine the way in which risk events play out. Risk governance thus needs to take account of how the many different stakeholders caught up in the event respond to the perceived risks. The NATO‐MoD funded MERREA project was aimed at exploring these processes of risk response through a series of case studies, as a basis for developing more effective risk governance strategies. This paper describes the study and summarises results from a cross‐cutting analysis of the case studies. It highlights five key issues: the inadequate identification and characterisation of stakeholders that occurs in many risk situations; the importance of given and self‐adopted roles in determining stakeholders' understanding and expectations of risk; the importance of recognising both formal and informal channels of risk communication in any risk situation, requiring the establishment of effective and open channels of communication well in advance of any event; the need to recognise, admit and communicate uncertainty in risk situations if trust is to be maintained; and the importance of establishing lead organisations for risk governance who carry the trust of all the stakeholders concerned.