Occupational Health & Safety Advisory Services (OHSAS)
Occupational Health & Safety Advisory Services (OHSAS) defines risk as the combination of the probability of a hazard resulting in an adverse event, and the severity of the event.
In information security, risk is defined as "the potential that a given threat will exploit vulnerabilities of an asset or group of assets and thereby cause harm to the organization”.
Economic risks can be manifested in lower incomes or higher expenditures than expected. The causes can be many, for instance, the hike in the price for raw materials, the lapsing of deadlines for construction of a new operating facility, disruptions in a production process, emergence of a serious competitor on the market, the loss of key personnel, the change of a political regime, or natural disasters.
In terms of occupational health & safety management, the term 'risk' may be defined as the most likely consequence of a hazard, combined with the likelihood or probability of its occurring. According to encyclopaedia, a Chemical accident is the unintentional release of one or more hazardous substances which could harm human health or the environment. Chemical hazards are systems where chemical accidents could occur under certain circumstances. Such events include fires, explosions, leakages or releases of toxic or hazardous materials that can cause people illness, injury, disability or death.
While chemical accidents may occur whenever toxic materials are stored, transported or used, the most severe accidents are industrial accidents, involving major chemical manufacturing and storage facilities. The most significant chemical accident in recorded history was the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which more than 3,000 people had died after a highly toxic vapour, (methyl isocyanate), was released at a Union Carbide Pesticides factory.
Under Environmental risk analysis an emerging field practitioners identify the potential events that could cause damage to the environment and assess the likelihood of an adverse outcome. An environmental risk assessment (ERA) is a process of predicting whether there may be a risk of adverse effects on the environment caused by a chemical substance.
Information technology risk, or IT risk, IT-related risk, or Cyber risk is a risk related to information technology. This relatively new term was developed as a result of an increasing awareness that information security is simply one facet of a multitude of risks that are relevant to IT and the real world processes it supports. Security risk management involves protection of assets from harm caused by deliberate acts. A more detailed definition is: "A security risk is any event that could result in the compromise of organizational assets i.e. the unauthorized use, loss, damage, disclosure or modification of organizational assets for the profit, personal interest or political interests of individuals, groups or other entities constitutes a compromise of the asset, and includes the risk of harm to people. Compromise of organizational assets may adversely affect the enterprise, its business units and their clients. As such, consideration of security risk is a vital component of risk management.
One of the growing areas of focus in risk management is the field of human factors where behavioural and organizational psychology underpins our understanding of risk based decision making. This field considers questions such as "how do we make risk based decisions?", "why are we irrationally more scared of sharks and terrorists than we are of motor vehicles and medications?"
Positive and negative feedback about past risk taking can affect future risk taking. In an experiment, people who were led to believe they are very competent at decision making saw more opportunities in a risky choice and took more risks, while those led to believe they were not very competent saw more threats and took fewer risks.
Studies and research papers on the subject of Emotional Intelligence have revealed that when people are anxious or in a state of emotion, they pay close attention to potential threats in the environment and are highly vigilant so as to preserve themselves and their resources (Eysenck, 1997; Pacheco Unguetti, Acosta, Callejas, & Lupiañez, 2010). This attention to threat and vigilance leads people to avoid risk (Loewenstein et al., 2001).
It is common for people to dread some risks but not others. They tend to be very afraid of epidemic diseases, nuclear power plant failures, and plane accidents but are relatively unconcerned about some highly frequent and deadly events, such as traffic crashes, household accidents, and medical errors. One key distinction of dreadful risks seems to be their potential for catastrophic consequences, threatening to kill a large number of people within a short period of time. For example, immediately after the September 11 attacks, many Americans were afraid to fly and took their car instead, a decision that led to a significant increase in the number of fatal crashes in the time period following the 9/11 event compared with the same time period before the attacks.
The concept of risk-based maintenance is an advanced form of Reliability Centered Maintenance. In case of chemical industries, apart from probability of failure, consequences of failure are also very important. Therefore, the selection of maintenance policies should be based on risk, instead of reliability.
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