**4. Knowledge about hazard and risk**

**1. Introduction**

254 Knowledge Management Strategies and Applications

**2. Method**

**3. Introduction in risk research**

The aim of this chapter is to critically reflect on definitions used in different disciplines during the procedure of risk management. Knowledge management is an important part of risk management and can be defined as a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access, and use of an intellectual asset [1]. This definition underlines the importance of knowledge management in risk management when different disciplines work together to identify the hazard, assess the risk, and finally predict mitigation mechanism [2]. To facilitate communication between different disciplines, we compared how risk management was approached in different disciplines. We recognized that harmonization of these approaches or definitions would be contraproductive as it would undermine the variety of knowledge and the tasks and perspectives of the different disciplines during the process of risk management. We, therefore, suggest to widen the understanding through appreciation of

The following disciplines were involved: public health, psychology, environmental health, occupational health, engineering, sociology, and medicine. The selection was made to get a wide variety of disciplines working in different areas but all with a link to risk and risk management. All selected participants have coauthored this chapter. They were recognized experts of risk‐related disciplines. They expressed their opinions and synthetized conclusion in a reiterative process. Each scientist was asked to present his/her own views on the given topics. The following questions were developed to get comparable responses from the participants: What is hazard and risk? How is hazard/risk assessed and which practice of hazard identification and risk assessment is used? and How is risk perception defined? The results were summarized, commented, and discussed by all authors. This method is appropriate as it allows and discusses different opinions. The aim was not to agree on one set of definitions, but critically reflect on the discipline‐related definitions of hazard, risk, and risk perception, and their assessments.

Risk is human being's attempt to understand and deal with life's dangers [3]. Thus, the main reason for talking about hazard and risk is to have a sufficiently accurate perception of the situation to make decisions and manage situations in a manner minimizing the probability of adverse effects. In some instances, these decisions are strictly personal and have implications for the individual only, but in other cases, the decision may have implications for larger groups of people, even for the whole population, or for the environment. Disciplines predominantly dealing with numbers and quantifications define risks based on a calculable phenomenon; biological, natural, and technological scientists define risks as objective reality (mostly also in quantitative ways); sociologists view it as a social and cultural construct, whereas psychology looks at it as a cognitive and behavioral phenomenon. Each discipline

these differences between disciplines and not to harmonize definitions.

In the historical perspective, no notion of risk is to be found in traditional cultures: preindustrial hazards or dangers like famines, plagues, or natural disasters were experienced as pregiven. They came from "others"—gods, nature, or demons [7]. However, when carefully reinterpreting the historical perspective, it appears that the notion of risk was already there, albeit implicitly, because one does not have to know the origin of a hazard in order to apply mitigation measures to avoid harm and suffering. One could even argue that sacrificing a virgin to please the god to avoid plagues or nature catastrophes involved an understanding and/or management of a hazard. It may well be that preventive actions taken today will in the future be regarded as similarly useless and surprisingly little evidence‐based as sacrificing virgins to prevent plagues is regarded today.

In the historical perspective, first with the beginning of societal attempts to control risk, and particularly with the idea of steering toward a future of predictable security, the consequences of risk became political issues. Thus, it is a societal intervention—in the form of decision‐making attempts to transform incalculable hazards into calculable risks.

Nowadays, it is necessary to separate the notions of risk and hazard. Knowledge about the hazard should be present before labeling any event as "risky." Hazard can be defined as an event [8] but it can also be considered as a condition or factor with a potential for causing an event, thus, as a synonym to danger. In this way, hazard is a qualitative term that tells whether exposure to a chemical or drug or certain behavior such as physical inactivity has the potential to cause an undesirable outcome on human health or other things we value, e.g., the environment. The evaluation of an event as a hazard is a mix of objective and subjective data, with the latter depending on individual or at least cultural preferences. The scientific component of the evaluation of the hazard aims to be objective and with a dichotomous (qualitative) outcome, namely being hazardous or not. Scientific uncertainty adds to complexity, if for instance studies on the carcinogenicity of a chemical are controversial, which may add some subjective elements (different researchers interpreting the same studies in different ways) and a categorical scale replacing the dichotomous one to express the level of scientific uncertainty. Nevertheless, researchers then continue to collect further evidence until ultimately the hazard can be established or rejected. Objectively, hazards can be fatal or life‐threatening, leading to disability or only to temporary discomfort; hence, classified according to dimensions of impact on life and of reversibility. The assessment of severity is a quantitative part of hazard evaluation, and the subjective acceptance is the qualitative part. It is subjective because it is the individual's own judgment reflecting their values and preferences.

On the basis of these facts, a dichotomous hazard will be transformed into a quantitative risk term [9]. In all disciplines, there are two most known concepts of risk definition: the probability of occurrence and severity of the undesirable outcome. Under this approach, risk is the probability function that reflects in quantitative terms the likelihood that a hazard manifests itself while as we have alluded to earlier, the undesirable outcome is the hazard.
