As of January 2006 the RMS program has changed to the Risk and Vulnerability program.

As countries in both the developing and developed world contemplate increasing losses from natural, accidental and deliberate disasters, and as the victims relate these losses to human culpability, issues of equity and efficiency for preventing and absorbing the losses are becoming pre-eminent. These issues cannot be addressed solely with expertise on the physical and economic phenomena, but they will require an understanding of the diverse social concerns, the complex institutional processes and cultural settings. Because risk management entails fundamental value issues on who bears the risks and the costs of their reduction, a legitimate and fair policy process is critical for public acceptance of risk management decisions. In many countries, the public and other stakeholders are demanding to be heard in these processes.

This RMS project on Governance and Fairness is contributing to the design of stakeholder processes for resolving controversial risk burden sharing issues. It will build on our model-based stakeholder process that successfully crafted a consensus, among the local politicians, insurance companies, environment groups, national ministries and the people living in the flood-risk areas, on sharing the economic costs of flooding in the Upper Tisza region. The simulation modeling, stakeholder interviews and workshops will form the conceptual basis for similar projects on China’s Dongting Lake and Japan’s ToNankai region.

Building on these projects, RMS is well situated to launch more intensive activities on water and governance, and project staff are participating in a EU funded project on New Approaches to Adaptive Water Management Under Uncertainty. The NeWater project will apply concepts of participation and adaptive management to selected European, Asian and African river systems with a focus on processes for dealing with the inherent uncertainty.

Risk issues are increasingly “global” as responsibility for many risks is spreading across borders, for instance, as countries in the “South” attribute losses from weather-related catastrophes to greenhouse gas emissions in the “North”, as fears mount that global competition will replace systems of social security with market solutions that many feel will not preserve social cohesion nor avoid excessive inequalities, or as Asian farmers protest the slaughtering of thousands of birds that may carry infectious diseases. These global risk issues, and processes for resolving them in a fair and legitimate way, are the topic of an RMS book project titled In All Fairness.

This project is organized with five activities:

For more information, contact Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer

Responsible for this page: Karolina Werner
Last updated: 24 Feb 2011