Communicating Geographical Risks in Crisis Management: The Need for Research

The Assessment of COVID-19 Vulnerability Risk for Crisis Management

The subject of this article is to determine COVID-19 vulnerability risk and its change over time in association with the state health care system, turnover, and transport to support the crisis management decision-making process. The aim was to determine the COVID-19 Vulnerability Index (CVI) based on the selected criteria. The risk assessment was carried out with methodology that includes the application of multicriteria analysis and spatiotemporal aspect of available data. Particularly the Spatial Multicriteria Analysis (SMCA) compliant with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which incorporated selected population and environmental criteria were used to analyse the ongoing pandemic situation. The influence of combining several factors in the pandemic situation analysis was illustrated. Furthermore, the static and dynamic factors to COVID-19 vulnerability risk were determined to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 at the early stage of the pandemic situation. As a result, areas with a certain level of risk in different periods of time were determined. Furthermore, the number of people exposed to COVID-19 vulnerability risk in time was presented. These results can support the decision-making process by showing the area where preventive actions should be considered.

From Climate Change to Pandemics: Decision Science Can Help Scientists Have Impact

Scientific knowledge and advances are a cornerstone of modern society. They improve our understanding of the world we live in and help us navigate global challenges including emerging infectious diseases, climate change and the biodiversity crisis. However, there is a perpetual challenge in translating scientific insight into policy. Many articles explain how to better bridge the gap through improved communication and engagement, but we believe that communication and engagement are only one part of the puzzle. There is a fundamental tension between science and policy because scientific endeavors are rightfully grounded in discovery, but policymakers formulate problems in terms of objectives, actions and outcomes. Decision science provides a solution by framing scientific questions in a way that is beneficial to policy development, facilitating scientists’ contribution to public discussion and policy. At its core, decision science is a field that aims to pinpoint evidence-based management strategies by focussing on those objectives, actions, and outcomes defined through the policy process. The importance of scientific discovery here is in linking actions to outcomes, helping decision-makers determine which actions best meet their objectives. In this paper we explain how problems can be formulated through the structured decision-making process. We give our vision for what decision science may grow to be, describing current gaps in methodology and application. By better understanding and engaging with the decision-making processes, scientists can have greater impact and make stronger contributions to important societal problems.

Plutonium Disposition: Using and Explaining Complex Risk-Related Methods

Applying risk assessment and management tools to plutonium disposition is a long-standing challenge for the U.S. government. The science is complicated, which has helped push risk assessment and management tools in new creative directions. Yet, communicating effectively about increasingly complicated risk-science issues like plutonium disposition requires careful planning and speakers who can address why specific tools are selected, the past record of applying these tools, why assumptions sometimes are applied instead of reliable data, and how uncertainty is characterized. Speakers addressing risk issues must also overcome obstacles in communication arising from expert-audience differences in knowledge and legal restrictions on disclosing information. This perspective seeks to highlight and illustrate five key risk questions, about probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) and performance assessment (PA) in the context of managing plutonium defense nuclear waste: objectives, experience, gaps, transparency, and difficulty of applying and communicating using each tool. While the general public needs to be involved, some issues require a level of expertise that is typically beyond local communities and therefore an expert panel should support community access.

The Role of Decision Analysis in Risk Analysis: A Retrospective

In commemorating the 40th anniversary of Risk Analysis, this article takes a retrospective look at some of the ways in which decision analysis (as a "sibling field") has contributed to the development both of the journal, and of risk analysis as a field. I begin with some early foundational papers from the first decade of the journal's history. I then review a number of papers that have applied decision analysis to risk problems over the years, including applications of related methods such as influence diagrams, multicriteria decision analysis, and risk matrices. The article then reviews some recent trends, from roughly the last five years, and concludes with observations about the parallel evolution of risk analysis and decision analysis over the decades-especially with regard to the importance of representing multiple stakeholder perspectives, and the importance of behavioral realism in decision models. Overall, the extensive literature surveyed here supports the view that the incorporation of decision-analytic perspectives has improved the practice of risk analysis.

Internet Public Opinion Risk Grading under Emergency Event Based on AHPSort II-DEMATEL

The internet often serves as a communication platform for users to freely express opinions. However, as it supports the quick and wide spread of public opinions, it often results in great uncertainty and is very difficult to control. As a result, evaluating the risk levels of internet public opinion becomes very challenging. The safety of internet public opinion affects the sustainability and stability of society. In this paper, a novel conceptual model of internet public opinion governance is proposed. The model can be used to grade risk levels by combining the Analytic Hierarchy Process Sort II (AHPSort II) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) under a fuzzy environment with triangular fuzzy sets. A numerical example is provided to verify the efficiency of the proposed method, and some managerial implications are also discussed.