Integrated and effctive risk management in an interconnected society

To manage the risks we face today require collaboration between many different organisations, both public and private. Irrespective if we are focusing on increasing our capability to deal with flooding or strengthening the robustness of our infrastructure systems, collaboration is necessary. No single organisation can protect what is valuable alone.

The increased need for collaboration is clearly visible both in Sweden and internationally. And the change towards a more collective and integrated approach implies a considerable change in the preconditions for how risks can be managed. From a situation where risk management were considered something of an internal matter for various organisations, it is nowadays obvious that the “silo-approaches” of yesterday is not enough to deal with the threats of today and tomorrow. Risk management has thus become transboundary in the sense that it crosses administrative borders.

Despite this fundamental shift in the preconditions for the management of risk many of the methods and procedures used still build on traditional approaches used to manage risk in well delimited systems which are well understood, for example a nuclear power plant or a chemical process industry. To learn from contexts such as those is positive and something that should be encouraged, but there is also a danger in assuming that they will work in an interconnected environment.
The purpose of the project Integrated and effective risk management in an interconnected society (Integrerad och effectfull riskhantering i ett sammankopplat samhälle) is to contribute with knowledge on how risk is managed, and how it should be managed, in contexts where multiple actors need to work together to protect what is valuable. The project is financed by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and will be conducted jointly by Lund university and Karlstad university. The project will run for five years (until 2026) and consists of five work packages. For more information, please visit the project homepage, http://www.riskhantera.nu/enter/project_integrate.html (in Swedish) or contact the project leader Henrik Tehler ([email protected]).