Welfare risk assessment:The benefits and common pitfalls

Risk is defined as a situation involving exposure to danger. Risk assessment by nature characterises the probability of a negative event occurring and quantifies the consequences of such an event. Risk assessment is increasingly being used in the field of animal welfare as a means of drawing comparisons between multiple welfare problems within and between species and identifying those that should be prioritised by policy-makers, either because they affect a large proportion of the population or because they have particularly severe consequences for those affected. The assessment of risk is typically based on three fundamental factors: intensity of consequences, duration affected by consequences and prevalence. However, it has been recognised that these factors alone do not give a complete picture of a hazard and its associated consequences. Rather, to get a complete picture, it is important to also consider information about the hazard itself: probability of exposure to the hazard and duration of exposure to the hazard. The method has been applied to a variety of farmed species (eg poultry, dairy cows, farmed fish), investigating housing, husbandry and slaughter procedures, as well as companion animals, where it has been used to compare inherited defects in pedigree dogs and horses. To what extent can we trust current risk assessment methods to get the priorities straight? How should we interpret the results produced by such assessments? Here, the potential difficulties and pitfalls of the welfare risk assessment method will be discussed: (i) the assumption that welfare hazards are independent; (ii) the problem of quantifying the model parameters; and (iii) assessing and incorporating variability and uncertainty into welfare risk assessments. © 2012 Universities Federation for Animal Welfare.

The Risk Implications of Globalisation: An Exploratory Analysis of 105 Major Industrial Incidents (1971–2010)

This paper revisits work on the socio-political amplification of risk, which predicts that those living in developing countries are exposed to greater risk than residents of developed nations. This prediction contrasts with the neoliberal expectation that market driven improvements in working conditions within industrialising/developing nations will lead to global convergence of hazard exposure levels. It also contradicts the assumption of risk society theorists that there will be an ubiquitous increase in risk exposure across the globe, which will primarily affect technically more advanced countries. Reviewing qualitative evidence on the impact of structural adjustment reforms in industrialising countries, the export of waste and hazardous waste recycling to these countries and new patterns of domestic industrialisation, the paper suggests that workers in industrialising countries continue to face far greater levels of hazard exposure than those of developed countries. This view is confirmed when a data set including 105 major multi-fatality industrial disasters from 1971 to 2000 is examined. The paper concludes that there is empirical support for the predictions of socio-political amplification of risk theory, which finds clear expression in the data in a consistent pattern of significantly greater fatality rates per industrial incident in industrialising/developing countries.