Case Studies:

Nowadays risk is seldom explicitly introduced in the decision making equation, despite the fact that risk is often invoked:

• The city of Sion, Switzerland was the first in the world to attach a risk assessment to its 2006 Winter Olympic candidature.
• The military talk about risk mitigation often resolving to send in the Air Force first to reduce land troops exposure.
• Triage in hospitals and surgery where quality of “remaining life” is discussed by medical doctors, people are sent to nursing homes without re-education etc. can also be seen as expressions of risk based decisions.

However, when looked at in detail these approaches merely represent “covering risk with sweet words” in order to avoid, or prevent, public outcry. That’s because people claim they do not like to “hear risk” and “do not like to be treated like numbers”, but gladly accept the results of unclear choices that avoid looking explicitly to the real exposures.

The case studies included in this book deal with a wide spectrum of activities where Risk and Crisis Management have been used to improve sustainability of medium to large scale projects in:

• Urban Development: when a city decides to fight crime by incentivating legal businesses to colonize a river’s low embankment in the middle of a large city.
• Humanitarian Demining: optimizing resources allocation, lowering improper site selection, developing long term plans are among the objectives that can be achieved using the proper risk management tools.
• Regional and Provincial Development Planning: a large scale mapping of the risks arising from a multitude of natural and man-made hazards reveals a very different image of a territory when compared to its physical topography.
• Counter Terrorism Planning: allotting resources, implementing defenses, prioritizing and defining alert levels are possible outcomes of a proper risk management approach based on a number of very sensible and sound axioms.
• Flood Protection: where to protect, what to protect, how to protect are the questions that proper risk based decision making can help to answer in a sustainable manner.
• Linear Facilities Protection: whether these are to be designed or maintained, decision making and prioritization programs are key elements of a sustainable operation.

Sample Chapter

Selected Articles

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