Report on policies, policy-making processes, and governance for multi- hazard, multi-risk management
This paper centers around the questions how risks can be better managed by considering the interrelated effects of multiple hazards and how we can better account for dynamic feedback between risk drivers and for trade-offs and synergies across sectors, regions, and hazards. The goal is to support risk-informed management and decision-making in the EU. The development of long-term plans and strategic solutions from a multi-risk perspective requires a good understanding of the decision context and processes that govern multi-hazards and multi-risks.
This report investigates and reviews the current multi-risk governance practice in Europe. It analyses existing international and European policies and communications with regard to their consideration of key elements of multi-hazards and multi-risk. The paper presents the national risk assessment process as an important avenue for risk governance practice in Europe; the assessment within this study concludes that the present embedding of a multi-risk perspective in the national risk assessments does not meet the ambition of the international and European policies. The paper presents a selection of representative, promising and prominent approaches from scientific mulit-risk research to illustrate recent advancements from the academic community. Two main conclusions are: (1) multi-risk needs further consideration in existing policies; and (2) the scientific community needs to embed the considerations of good governance principles into the development and testing of new tools for multi-risk identification assessment, management, and communication.