(Transcript)

The perception and management of risks is a central theme that is being developed by our Animal et Gestion Intégrée des Risques (AGIRs) team. I am working with vets, anthropologists, sociologists and economists. We share a multidisciplinary vision of risk management.

Vanessa Manceron told us that risk was the missing link in a chain of causality, and this idea has been taken up by modellers who attempt to explain incidents by a sequence of events that follow each other, while at the same time including the notion of probability.

Vanessa also emphasised that danger is not the exclusive domain of experts, but is of interest to all the social stakeholders, and she added that the cultural framework is primordial in defining risk.

What I have retained from the presentations of Adrian Pop and Bruno Vindel is that we are faced with very complex systems, and that it is difficult to distinguish chains of simple causality. Methods for describing these systems must be innovative. We use two terms to qualify them: constructivist – concrete experience of an event, knowledge of the past, and post-normal method – when facts are uncertain, values are debated, and the stakes high; it is necessary to have an innovative method to find solutions in the full knowledge that there is no universal one.

Yves Le Bars defined risk as being the sum of hazards, vulnerabilities and exposures, and the necessity of engineering and fabricating public policies; from Jean-Philippe Fontenelle’s presentation, we shall retain that risk maps are representations that may be understood as models that are subject to discussion.