Public understanding of risk

With increasing technological and social complexity, risk plays an important role in our interconnected world.

Increasing the public understanding of risk is a critical factor in improving the quality of individual, business and political decisions in the face of risk.

How can we invest time and resources to increase risk literacy and make the world a safer place?

Our Foresight Review on the Public Understanding of Risk identified three key recommendations:

1. Improving the public understanding of risk requires an needs an open dialogue to understand the concerns of different groups about specific risks - not a top-down approach to inform people of the findings of technical analyses. There is an opportunity for trusted organisations to help in this, especially through developing risk-literate intermediaries and institutions.
2. The establishment of social science-based institutions like the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR), through the use of in-depth real-world case studies, can advance the study of public understanding of risk and to impact real-world outcomes, in Asia and beyond.
3. Adoption of a framework that sees the understanding of risk as a dynamic process, which can be harnessed by working at the interface of technical risk assessment, intuitive risk perception and integrative risk management, and seeking iterative learning from interventions.