Risk Management Practices

Abstract

The inevitable public unease in the wake of large infrastructure failure prompts questions regarding how to properly define and manage the risks of various engineered activities to socially acceptable levels. A changing climate may add additional vulnerability to infrastructure and thus should be considered in risk management strategies. Current implementations of risk management processes differ across public agencies, but often rely on a concept of Tolerable Risk. Tolerable Risk is a numerical value for the boundary—in a continuum of management alternatives—below which risk is tolerated to secure societal benefits, though engineering interventions may be still be necessary and proper to achieve higher degrees of protection. This chapter gives an overview of risk management and introduces the Tolerable Risk framework, reviews and summarizes risk management frameworks for several federal and foreign agencies, and recommends key features and necessary steps for a Tolerable Risk framework implementation. The ideas in this chapter draw extensively from a March 2008 interagency workshop on Tolerable Risk sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and attended by several additional federal and foreign agencies [33].