Understanding Risk 2014: producing actionable information

The Understanding Risk 2014 Forum ran at University College London, in London, from 30 June to 4 July 2014. Its theme was “Producing Actionable Information”: risk assessments that lead to decisions rather than reports that sit on a shelf. The organiser was the Understanding Risk (UR) community, which gave understandrisk.org as its web address.

The event listing gave the dates, the venue and the web address, and showed a video of the previous forum, UR 2012. It did not describe a specific role for ENHANCE at the forum.

The theme matched a point ENHANCE partners made repeatedly. In the second Letter from Sendai, written in March 2015, the project argued that risk assessments should be designed around the questions their end-users actually need answered, and noted that access to data and models was still a problem in many places (Letters from Sendai no. 2). Steve Jewson of the catastrophe modeller RMS made a similar case for open public data in his interview with the project (Steve Jewson interview).

London was also the setting for one of the ENHANCE case studies, on flood risk and the partnerships between government, insurers and the city that manage it (London flood case study). The other cases are listed in the case-study atlas.