So how Risky is it?
The travails about having a conversation about risk, and why we need civic education curriculum around the world to focus on risk education
The 8 billion+ people on the planet, occupy a diverse set of ideologies, traditions, & realities so to find a common thread that traverses these boundaries has presented a challenge to policy makers who represent the interests of the people. Apart from the basic needs of sustenance, a daily experience shared by ALL the people is the need to perform risk management that optimizes their energy & resources both at an individual level & at the aggregate level of the communities they share.
The taxonomy associated with risk is a particularly interesting and difficult problem to deal with when we live in a world where many aspects of what is needed to ensure the basic quality of life from material needs to shared goods such as clean air & water is boundary free i.e. it is likely that actions taken beyond provincial boundaries impact the availability and quality of these objects.
This implies that the way we speak, classify and exchange information about risk and more importantly communicate it across the stakeholder spectrum which can run from hyper-local (such as your family and neighborhood) to extremely global (a forum facilitated by the United Nations) will ideally need a taxonomy that is consistent.
When there is a conversation around an investment for an industrial facility to whether there is a need to expend capital towards improving public infrastructure, the reality and limitations today extend far beyond the boundaries of the facility. And almost all these conversations are in the realm of risk & the trade-offs that it forces. The ability to localize conversations around risk are not only unrealistic but would also likely force sub optimal outcomes.
In his speech at the World Economic Forum in 2020, the Professor of history & writer Yuval Noah Harari alluded to this reality in the most succinct manner possible - "If you like the World Cup - you are already a globalist," – and as with sports, it really does not matter where the conversation is being had – the rules of the game translate effortlessly across boundaries.
There is lesson in there for risk education and communication, which is to have a lingua franca such as in sports, will likely allow for far greater engagement with the public.
So how do we do this? The brass tacks of it is the need for civic education – and to have a first principle driven risk education. Civic education in the 20th century has focused on trying to create a citizenship that drives the message that citizens should be empowered and responsible stewards of the local, state and national resources. However, as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century it is clear that there is an element of citizenship that demands a much greater understanding of the inherent tradeoffs that exist as decisions are made in these realms. The continued presence of the idea of Win-win and its pervasive hold in both national and international conversation is a reminder that as a public we continue to deny what is most cases is the reality – if an idea is being sold as a Win-win – there is either a lack of understanding of how decisions are playing out or worse yet willful obfuscation.
The temptation to compartmentalize risk education to be domain specific is understandable.
How can the risk of an explosion due to a hazardous substance, be compared to a risk presented by climate change to public infrastructure or a health hazard presented to a large population? Furthermore, it is also true that the origins of these highly disparate events and the safety protection systems needed to manage the risk are as diverse as the events themselves. Hence, more often than not a highly simplistic reduction is carried out especially in popular media and national conversations which is to present the risk as some form of a frequency (how many times last week someone said something like this is a 1 in X thousand year phenomena).
This might be justified by the fact that the idea that time is a relatable experience across demographics and populations – but what is often overlooked is that this distillation and highly simplistic representation comes with assumptions galore (which likely never get the daylight of discussion and debate) and can lead to highly erroneous understanding and decision making. For example, if the root cause for a so-called 1 in 1000 year weather event is becoming more pronounced, then it is likely that the event is also going to be more frequent, which (far more common than 1 in 1000 year) – and this leads to endless debates. What likely is more pertinent is for us to ask – What does the event cost us now, and what can we invest to reduce the cost in the future (or how much we are willing to pay if it happens in the future)?
The value and cost of risk is just that – we are trading the economic benefits of exposing the population to hazards which when tamed can bring it with an outsized benefit. The trade is always about where that benefit is located and who is the recipient. Traditional civic education which has focused on governance in many ways shares the similarity of identifying and educating the population about where the locus of power is present, and how it is administered to ensure the benefit to the larger citizenship.
The extremely long-life cycle associated with civic education and the benefits it can bestow on the population necessitates the need to demand the need to include risk education today and as early as possible across programs around the world. There is a second ancillary benefit that the understanding of risk and it’s movement across the world provides, - it provides perspective. It also brings proximity to what may be seen as problems far away much closer to home since it allows for the public to understand the supply chain of risk – and empowers it to question the status quo.
A world where we speak in the language of risk – which are a set of trade-offs and not Win-wins will likely allow us to both literally and figuratively work towards lowering the global temperature.