The AllChemE Seminars
Where science meets society

Risk perception, communication and management: lessons for policy makers
Prof. Ragnar Lofstedt, King’s Centre for Risk Management, King’s College London.

Highlights
•	Risk communication is difficult and requires a sound understanding of how the public perceives risk and the circumstances of the particular risk being communicated.
•	Risk communication should be well managed with roles of contributing bodies well defined, information vacuums avoided and messages constructed to ensure risk is not unnecessarily amplified.
•	The role of communicating uncertainty is a controversial aspect of risk communication. Uncertainty can confuse the recipients of the communication and lead to mis-communication of risk. However this needs to be balanced with considerations of trust and dialogue.

Summary
Delegates were welcomed to the fifth AllChemE Seminar at the European Parliament by Simon Webb who introduced Bruce Ballantine representing the European Policy Centre (EPC), the co-sponsors for the event. The host MEP Mrs Ria Oomen-Ruijten expressed her support for the seminar initiative and indicated that improved dialogue over issues such as REACH is important to achieve a practical and useful conclusion: tapping into the experience and information within the industry is very important, she stressed.

Professor Ragnar Löftstedt introduced his discussion by defining risk as ‘the possibility that human actions or events lead to consequences that have an impact on what humans value’. Risk communication has its roots in risk perception which is related to human value judgments. According to him, a series of variables influence how the public perceive risk. These include whether a risk is voluntary or non voluntary, natural or due to technological development, the balance of the probability of the risk happening and its consequences, whether the risk has a potential impact on reproductive organs, as well as trust and fairness. By uncovering these variables it should be possible to gauge how the public perceives a particular risk and form an appropriate communications strategy.

Three basic strategies have evolved: top-down – the one-way presentation of scientific facts; dialogue -- a two way form of persuasive communication most widely used today; and bottom-up -- a stakeholder interaction in a social context which occurs from time to time, such as NGO actions.

To illustrate an example of regulatory failure in risk communication, Löfstedt examined the Swedish acrylamide in food scare in 2002. The Swedes had already had an acrylamide food scare in 1997 a tunnel construction project had used acrylamide as a sealant which had subsequently leached into ground water in one of Sweden’s most productive agricultural regions. As a consequence of research on tunnel workers, high levels of acrylamide – a material that had shown to be a carcinogen in rats – were found to be present in control groups. Further work to establish the origin of this led to results showing that cooked, especially fried, food could be a source of acrylamide. This data was published in April 2002 and caused a media frenzy, including one of the most well-attended press conferences in Swedish media history, and resulting in high levels of public awareness and concern over the issue. A considerable drop in sales of cooked carbohydrate food, such as chips, crisps and bread, was recorded immediately after the announcement, though they have now returned to their original levels. A number of communication issues amplified the media and public reaction, said Löfstedt. These included information vacuums, the involvement of too many organizations with communication roles not rigourously defined, communicating uncertainty, and the use of messages that amplified the perception of risk.

Finally, Löfstedt emphasized the need for researchers, regulators and communicators to operate as a team in managing emerging food issues. Amplifying risks unnecessarily, he said, leads to confusion in the public. Messages should focus on the aspects that are certain and should avoid uncertainty if possible, as communicating uncertainty can significantly affect how a message in interpreted. In general, he concluded, communicating risk is never easy and each issue requires an individual approach – there is no universally applicable communication solution.

Debate
A vigourous debate ensued, which focused mostly around the communication of uncertainty, as several people in the audience disagreed with Löfstedt’s statement that uncertainty should not be communicated when it is not deemed necessary. Löfstedt held that trying to communicate uncertainty was very difficult and not appropriate in many cases. A number of speakers, including MEP Mrs Inger Schörling held that open dialogue was essential in a modern democracy and that this included transparent discussion about uncertainty. Keeping discussion of uncertainty behind closed doors was not appropriate and would undermine trust in science. Löfstedt replied that communicating uncertainty could confuse communication on risk especially if there was a debate on the level of uncertainty that overwhelmed the risk message, and that therefore communicating uncertainty should only be done when necessary. The concept of dialogue, he pursued, is always the best method to engage with the public but it is essential that a true cross-section of public opinion is involved.