Risk-informed WASH resilience – the basics

Where there is an action, there always are risks. Whether you are managing a project, building infrastructure, running a service, or simply living life, risks are an inevitable part of the process.
My name is Assela Pathirana, Associate professor of water infrastructure asset management at IHE Delft Institute for water education. I will work with you in this section to learn
• the concept of risk, different definitions
• different perspectives on risk and
• risk assessment approaches
We will follow this in several lessons and we will also do an exercise to reinforce what we have learned.
Before you dive into the lesson, I want to give you a sneak preview of what you will encounter. We will start with many definitions of risk and diverse formulations different organizations and disciplines use to work with it. In the beginning, this will be somewhat confusing for you. However, soon you will understand that despite these seemingly different ways of describing risk, all of them lead to the same general concept.
Then we will briefly discuss different perspectives of risk. the ‘object’ that is potentially under threat and the ‘subject’ that is acting on the object to cause the threat based on subject.
We will discuss risk assessment next. You will learn two approaches to quantifying risk – we call them risk equation versions 1 and 2.
We will discuss how to look at the causes, … and impacts of a risk.
You will also learn that a final numerical value of the risk does not tell the full story – especially what should be done to mitigate or manage it. We will learn how we can use a risk matrix to support decision-making.
In part 2 of the lesson, we apply what we have learned in an exercise using a practical case study.
I hope you will find the lessons enjoyable and useful.

00:00 : Start
00:33 : Learning objectives
00:51 : What we will cover
02:18 : Exercise 1
02:44 : Risk Definitions
06:54 : Subject and Object of Risk
08:35 : Risk Quantification
10:46 : A hypothetical example
12:17 : All risk equations mean the same thing!
16:39 : Risk equation version 1
22:53 : Excercise 2
23:09 : Risk equation version 2
26:51 : Risk Matrix
29:50 : Exercise 3
30:17 : Causes and impacts - A bowtie diagram
32:23 : Risk management strategies
38:45 : What we have learned