Principles of risk decision-making

ABSTRACT

Risk management decisions in public health require consideration of a number of complex, often conflicting factors. The aim of this review was to propose a set of 10 fundamental principles to guide risk decision-making. Although each of these principles is sound in its own right, the guidance provided by different principles might lead the decision-maker in different directions. For example, where the precautionary principle advocates for preemptive risk management action under situations of scientific uncertainty and potentially catastrophic consequences, the principle of risk-based decision-making encourages decision-makers to focus on established and modifiable risks, where a return on the investment in risk management is all but guaranteed in the near term. To evaluate the applicability of the 10 principles in practice, one needs to consider 10 diverse risk issues of broad concern and explore which of these principles are most appropriate in different contexts. The 10 principles presented here afford substantive insight into the process of risk management decision-making, although decision-makers will ultimately need to exercise judgment in reaching appropriate risk decisions, accounting for all of the scientific and extra-scientific factors relevant to the risk decision at hand.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk science
• risk management
• decision theory
• risk decision-making
• risk context

Acknowledgments

DK is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Chair in Risk Science at the University of Ottawa. The authors are grateful to three referees, whose constructive comments served to improve the original draft of this paper. We also thank Abdallah Alami for his assistance in the final formatting of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10937404.2022.2107591

Notes

1. The lifetime tolerable benchmark risks of 10^–5 to 10^–7 have been proposed primarily for risks associated with toxic chemicals in the environment, and do not necessarily apply to other risk contexts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [IRCPJ 394852 - 13]. PSH and PL were supported by post doctoral fellowships from the McLauglin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment at the University of Ottawa.