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A risk analysis framework for prioritizing and managing biosecurity threats

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posted on 2020-06-25, 10:13 authored by Gilberto MontibellerGilberto Montibeller, Luis Alberto FrancoLuis Alberto Franco, Ashley Carreras
The increasing need to manage biosecurity threats, such as diseases, zoonoses, and biological weapons, poses serious challenges for risk analysts and policymakers. These threats are large in number, can occur concurrently, and may cause multiple tangible and intangible impacts. They often have an emerging nature, exacerbated by incomplete evidence about their probability of occurrence and potential impacts. There is also a limited amount of time and resources available to evaluate the risks posed by each threat, and it is difficult to learn from past projects. On the other hand, there is also a need to provide policymakers with transparent and consistent threat prioritizations, together with evidence‐based recommendations. In response to these challenges, we propose a risk analysis framework for the prioritization and management of biosecurity threats. The framework encompasses key design choices that analysts may use in risk analysis projects along three dimensions: risk support , risk group , and risk organization . The framework has prescriptive value, as a design tool to inform risk analysis projects in this context, along with descriptive value, as a learning tool to understand past projects. We applied the framework prescriptively in two biosecurity threat prioritization projects for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and illustrate its descriptive value by reporting our experience of these projects as in‐depth case studies. Overall, the proposed framework provides important insights into the impact of different design choices on the success of risk analysis projects for biosecurity threat prioritizations.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Risk Analysis

Volume

40

Issue

11

Pages

2462-2477

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Acceptance date

2020-06-01

Publication date

2020-06-24

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0272-4332

eISSN

1539-6924

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Alberto Franco. Deposit date: 24 June 2020

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