Global support for communities in making sense of risk
Risk know-how helps communities to navigate risk information and assess benefits and trade-offs within their own context.
Community Risk Practitioners
Every day, thousands of people all over the world are helping their communities to make sense of risk. Many are doing this with limited support or tools. Risk practitioners from diverse communities, different cultures and varied environments have shared their insights and knowledge of managing risk in everyday life with us, and what is needed for them to make informed decisions.
EXPLORERisk know-how Framework
Risk know-how is about informed decision-making.
Every risk entails a trade-off with the benefits and costs of action or inaction, which need to be weighed up to make a decision. Community risk practitioners and risk experts have identified common issues and needs for empowering people to make these decisions. This has been developed through discussions with them, for use by in everyday life.
Becky JonesScience Communications ProfessionalCommunication | Information Framing & ManipulationEurope | UNITED KINGDOMMentioning the role of the animal in biomedical research is vital for transparent communication and managing expectations. For example, the majority of media coverage for Alzheimer’s omits that research was conducted with mice. By the time it gets to the public, people think ‘this is great, there is a cure coming and it’s obviously being tested with humans!’. However, if you go back to the original research that it is coming from, it shows that research was conducted on six mice. People don’t realise that a lot of everyday medicines have also come through animal testing and knowing that is important when discussing and deciding on whether you are for or against such research. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Cecelia AnaniasFounder - ONG AmarantaEducation & Training | Context & CommunitySouth America | CHILEIn the area of cyberbullying and many cases of violence too, it's very important to confront this as a community. My organization works to address any areas of lack of knowledge, but we also encourage the creation of communities that together can come together to make certain decisions and find a natural way to be on the internet. Having that community support can help if you are a victim of cyberbullying, to not go through it alone and to see how you can recover from it. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Ben BaileyDirector, Advocacy and Regional Engagement - The Mission to SeafarersMaritime | Context & CommunityEurope | UNITED KINGDOMThe cultural element when it comes to dealing with seafarers is fundamental, and it’s often the most overlooked part. Maybe we have approached the issue from our own cultural context, or we tried to apply our own perspective when speaking to seafarers from other regions, but it turns out, actually, they have a completely different view. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Amy PedenResearcher/Lecturer in Injury Prevention, Epidemiology and Control - University of New South WalesEducation & Training | Public Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsOceania | AUSTRALIACommunicating the need to swim between the flags and having patrolled beaches is important and a vital part of preventing drowning. Conversely, rivers are the leading location of drownings, and we don’t have the benefit of years of education, life-saving clubs, and lifeguarded locations where it is safe to swim. Our work on media communication has shown that it’s partly because people just don’t hear about drowning at these locations. When it doesn’t happen in the cities or along the coast, it’s not reported as often in the media. Rivers are the area of highest risk but are not perceived as such, because they don’t benefit from the funding, the awareness, and the preventative... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Cameron ByerleyAssistant Professor of MathematicsEducation & Training | Training & SupportNorth America | USAThe motivation behind our project is our experience in math education and research on how people think about relative size, percentages, fractions, ratios, and proportions. When I was watching the media in the COVID pandemic, I knew that making sense of the percentages was going to be hard for people because if you think about your everyday life, do you know how risky driving somewhere is as a percent? Do you know how risky anything really is as a percent? When you hear on the news, that you have a 10% risk or 1% risk, it’s very hard to make sense of what that really means. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Barry DunneEHS Manager - JMG Solutions LtdMaritime | Information Framing & ManipulationEurope | UNITED KINGDOMI spend a lot of time developing risk assessments and method statements to have procedures in place to work. And then you do your initial induction safety brief, and you have a 42-page document in English. But half of the people on my team are not native English speakers. If I was given that myself as an English reader, I would not be able to consume that. So, what I often do is reduce the text by more than half and use photographs. It streamlines the process, and you can also use it to point at a picture and go yes or no; everybody understands yes and no. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Anthony WarnerChef and Food WriterSociety & Culture | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | UNITED KINGDOMPeople are capable of complex and nuanced risk calculations on many topics. But we often also have blind spots where we overestimate or underestimate the risks or the benefits… I see this with people choosing to cut out food groups, overestimating the benefit this might have and underestimating the risks it could pose to their health. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Amos ZachariaAnaesthesiologist & HOD - Mbeya Zonal Referral Hospital, University of Dar es Salaam, Mbeya CollegePublic Health | Training & SupportAfrica | TANZANIAIn developing countries, many patients lack perioperative education. The time they spend with a surgeon or anaesthetist in a clinic before surgery is very short. These healthcare providers are few and are expected to attend many cases until late hours. We therefore need to introduce patients ‘perioperative information/education leaflets in both urban and rural hospitals. There is room to study how effectively this intervention will be delivered based on the cultural and economic differences between regions. Will electronic versions or hardcopies work equally? Are there other methods which can work better in developing countries to make sure people have access to the information patterning... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Aaron TaylorHire Assistant at Stour KayakCommunication | Context & CommunityEurope | UNITED KINGDOMIt’s important that we strike a balance between positivity and informality and ensure the customers are aware of the risks inherent to the activity. We also need to make sure that the means of mitigating those risks are covered. Going over the risks associated with kayaking can be dry and boring, and if we were to list all the risks sequentially, the listener would just switch off. They’ll start focusing on other things. They become over-stimulated and then choose to not listen to any of the information. So, we try to inject humour and positivity into our pre-activity safety and risk briefings, keeping it relatively informal. This ensures that the kayakers concentrate and are better able... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Anik SinghaSenior Officer- Beximco Pharmaceuticals LtdPublic Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsAsia | BANGLADESHI work in the industrial sector or private sector in Bangladesh. Specifically, the industry is related and responsible for manufacturing life-saving drugs required by healthcare-practitioners, healthcare facilities and their staffs, also general public ill or non-ill. It is also known as pharmaceuticals sector. Key risks and issues anyone working in this area needs to be aware of, a) Adverse event (AE) related with drug administration (pre & post). This event might lead to other serious event(s); extreme being, fatality. There is also possibilities of adverse drug reaction (ADR). I was also made aware of Pharmacovigilance (PV) as one of major Issues in risk assessment and management in... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Bernard OkebeRadio Journalist and Coordinator - Community Empowerment and Media InitiativeCommunication | Context & CommunityAfrica | KENYAIt is very helpful to speak to others in other communities about these topics and share stories because different communities understand and deal with risks and hazards in different ways and therefore understanding such, especially risk, from the community perspective is very important whenever we talk of risks. This will help in minimizing or reducing risks in communities/societies. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Chioma Blaise ChikereDirector of Entrepreneurship Centre - University of Port HarcourtEducation & Training | Environment | Training & SupportAfrica | NIGERIAThe community didn’t understand what was happening, but they knew their crops were dying, they knew the soil was not productive. It was the underlying problems associated with contaminated crops, soil and the health risks due to oil pollution that were not known to them. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Aliya Syahreni PrihartadiDoctorPublic Health | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | UNITED KINGDOMConveying and assessing risks is central to my role. A big part of my job is to explain diseases, its progression and its wider management to increase quality of life. We have to help people make informed decisions for their own health however with each decision there are always risks and benefits whether it be starting a medication or choosing an invasive intervention. It's very common for people to misunderstand what doctors say due to medical jargons as many of the terminologies are foreign to non-health professionals. To help them make informed decisions, the UK healthcare system, for invasive interventions or high risk medications, provide leaflets with clear jargon-free information... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Chandler ChristoffelUser Experience Librarian - UGA LibrariesEducation & Training | Information Framing & ManipulationNorth America | USAMy job is to help people find the information sources they need. But I also want to encourage information literacy - to interrogate some of their assumptions about what is reliable. As we look at search results together, I might point out different points of view, agendas and rhetorical strategies. We might start with sources from local, state or regional governments, then go to national governments and international agencies. After that, we might explore the grey literature, say from think tanks and NGOs. I also recommend tertiary information (handbooks, encyclopedias), which is great for non-specialists, and we look at the sources they use. We can suggest statistics databases that provide... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Ceri DaviesProject Manager - UNDP ZambiaCommunity Development | Context & CommunityAfrica | ZAMBIAThe types of risk information related to a variety of areas included environmental, health, livelihood risks. For example, with the COVID-19 pandemic, information was communicated regarding the risks of the disease and means of prevention, where to seek help etc. For environmental related risks, several project activities focused on increasing the knowledge of community members on environmentally hazardous practices (e.g. charcoal production), the consequences, and alternatives. The challenges were differences in understanding (lack of awareness/knowledge), complexity of concepts (i.e. something new that was difficult to understand/fathom), language barriers. Adapting communication/messages... SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Brianne De ManManager, Charitable Programs - Binner’s ProjectSociety & Culture | Training & SupportNorth America | CANADAMany of the binners we work with are on our staff team, and since they are on the payroll they are required by HR to go through occupational health and safety training. We have worked to create an accessible version of the OH&S material so binners get the necessary information without having to go through an online course. It is more about highlighting the things that apply to them versus things that may not be relevant to them. For example, they would not need to think about seating ergonomics since they are not working at a desk, but it’s important for them to know to not put their hands straight into a waste bag but to dump the contents onto a table and then sort through it. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Arish HaiderDoctor - The Koohi Goth HospitalPublic Health | Context & CommunityAsia | PAKISTANOne of the challenges e face is the cultural position of a traditional birth attendant (days). These women have no formal training in birthing practices, are inexperienced in medicine, and have zero knowledge of surgical hygiene. They are unable to support a woman through healthy labour, and can be dangerous to the mother and child's wellbeing. The risk these practices pose to the community is great. The only one way to overcome this is to train community midwives who possess both the skills and knowledge to carry out safe birth. In short, midwives save lives. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Alejandra AlbuerneArchitectural Engineer and Construction HistorianInfrastructure | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | GLOBALWorking in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes, the communities saw the concrete buildings that had survived the earthquakes as the buildings they would feel safe living in, but as an engineer, my perception of the risk was very different. In a different earthquake, many of those would not have been safe either. The buildings we designed had to be structurally sound and also make the community feel safe in them, as they were the ones that had to live in the buildings. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Adam ParnellDirector (Maritime) - CHIRP Aviation and Maritime Confidential Incident ReportingMaritime | Assessing Risks & Trade-offsEurope | GLOBALThere is what we can call a ‘culture of compliance’, where people are signing to say they’ve done things that they haven’t because they don’t have the time. For example, people sign to say they did an in-depth check on a certain piece of equipment or carried out maintenance work on it but only because they’re supposed to have done it and are pressurised to show that it’s done. However, everyone knows they didn’t, but they’ll lose their job if they don’t sign and say it was done. Of course, what they’re doing is then taking the personal liability on to themselves. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Bambang Hero SaharjoFire Forensics Specialist, Professor of the Environment and Forest Fires - Bogor Agricultural UniveEnvironment | Context & CommunityAsia | INDONESIAFor many of these communities, it is not easy to change behaviour. They might understand the risks but if there aren’t alternative ways for them to have an income, they will find it hard to stop what they are doing. They need support or to see other communities that have been successful. SEE ALL PRACTITIONERS |
Risk know-how helps communities to navigate risk information and assess benefits and trade-offs within their own context.
Having risk know-how equips people to weigh up claims and data about risk in the way that works best for their circumstances and the discussions they are having in their communities.
This site seeks to support people who find themselves at the heart of such discussions and involved in helping others to navigate risk information – risk know-how practitioners.
It portrays some of the many activities of people around the world that would benefit from better risk resources that address their dilemmas. It provides a framework – drawn from real world experiences ranging from conservation in Kenya to midwifery in the UK – to help everyone more clearly understand and communicate risk information.
The risk know-how initiative is for people at the heart of such discussions, and involved in helping others to navigate risk information – community risk practitioners.
Read More ...Risk know-how is an international partnership between Sense about Science and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, with support from colleagues at the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore.
At the heart of this initiative is a commitment to facilitating a meaningful dialogue on the gaps between the public’s expectations and actual experiences of risk, enabling an evidence-based approach to policy design and interventions.
Risk is central to Sense about Science’s mission to equip people to engage with evidence and to empower them to weigh up risks and benefits. From nearly 20 years of experience in engaging communities, media and policymakers in risk issues, Sense about Science is confident that risk literacy needs to be experience-driven and shaped by the people who are trying to make their communities safer.
Public understanding of risk is a strategic priority for the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, which curates some of the most extensive and original data about risk and, with the World Risk Poll, risk perception.
The Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore, IPUR seeks to narrow the gap between people’s perceptions and real-world risks by undertaking research on the scientific understanding of risk and its practical application through a multi-disciplinary approach.
Risk is central to Sense about Science’s mission to equip people to engage with evidence and to empower them to weigh up risks and benefits. From nearly 20 years of experience in engaging communities, media and policymakers in risk issues, Sense about Science is confident that risk literacy needs to be experience-driven and shaped by the people who are trying to make their communities safer.
Public understanding of risk is a strategic priority for the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, which curates some of the most extensive and original data about risk and, with the World Risk Poll, risk perception.
The Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore, IPUR seeks to narrow the gap between people’s perceptions and real-world risks by undertaking research on the scientific understanding of risk and its practical application through a multi-disciplinary approach.
News & Developments:
Risk Know-How discussed at Euro Science Open Forum (ESOF) 2022
Jul 15, 2022
Sense about Science Director Tracey Brown was joined by Meaghan Kall (UK HAS), Jan Marco Müller (European Commission), Katherina Schüller (STAT-UP) and Sarah Cumbers (Lloyds Register Foundation) to discuss the question: Can We Make Informed Decisions Without...
READ MOREGlobal call for information providers to share knowledge not just data
Jul 14, 2022
The Risk Know-How initiative has highlighted the urgent need for those generating and communicating information and statistics important to people’s lives to think of themselves as answering questions, not just providing data. Nearly 100 community risk...
READ MORERisk know-how at Lloyd’s Register Foundation Safer World Conference in May 2022
May 13, 2022
The Risk Know-How team hosted a plenary session at the LRF Safer World Conference on Wed 11th May 2022. We presented our findings and insights from the project so far and convened a panel of experts in statistics, risk literacy and risk communications to...
READ MORERisk know-how framework featured in Significance magazine
Nov 27, 2021
‘What is Risk know-how?’ is Significance magazine’s December 2021 Stats Comms feature.
READ MORERisk know-how briefing in UK Parliament during Evidence Week 2021
Nov 23, 2021
MPs and parliamentary staff were briefed on risk know-how and its impact on helping their constituents to make sense of risk.
READ MORESession on Risk know-how at Understanding Risk Asia Conference in December 2021
Nov 23, 2021
A participative session on empowering people communicating about risks in their communities on December 3rd at part of the UR Asia conference.
READ MOREGet in touch
If you are helping your community navigate risk information, tell us about your experience. We would love to have a conversation with you.
For questions or comments on Risk know-how, email us.