Summary of the Strategic National Risk Assessment
The Strategic National Risk Assessment was written to support the National Preparedness Goal. You can download an unclassified summary of the National Risk Assessment at this link. (Thank you to the person who sent me the link.)
The seven page summary includes these sections:
- Overview
- Strategic National Risk Assessment Scope
- Overarching Themes to an All-Hazards Approach
- Analytic Approach
- Limitations
- Impacts and Future Uses
- Conclusion
Here is an excerpt from the Overview:
The Strategic National Risk Assessment (SNRA) was executed in support of Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8), which calls for creation of a National Preparedness Goal, a National Preparedness System, and a National Preparedness Report.
Specifically, national preparedness is to be based on core capabilities that support “strengthening the security and resilience of the United States through systematic preparation for the threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation, including acts of terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, and catastrophic natural disasters.”
… The assessment was used:
- To identify high risk factors that supported development of the core capabilities and capability targets in the National Preparedness Goal;
- To support the development of collaborative thinking about strategic needs across prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery requirements, and;
- To promote the ability for all levels of Government to share common understanding and awareness of National threats and hazards and resulting risks so that they are ready to act and can do so independently but collaboratively.
The subsequent pages provide an overview of the unclassified findings and the analytic approach used to conduct the SNRA. It should be emphasized, however, that although the initial version of the SNRA is a significant step toward the establishment of a new homeland security risk baseline, it contains data limitations and assumptions that will require additional study, review, and revision as the National Preparedness System is developed. These limitations are discussed below, and future iterations of the assessment are expected to reflect an enhanced methodology and improved data sets.
Below is a chart (taken from the Assessment) that summarizes:
… a series of national-level events with the potential to test the Nation’s preparedness….
For the purposes of the assessment, DHS identified thresholds of consequence necessary to create a national-level event. These thresholds were informed by subject matter expertise and available data. For some events, economic consequences were used as thresholds, while for others, fatalities or injuries/illnesses were deemed more appropriate as the threshold to determine a national-level incident. In no case, however, were economic and casualty thresholds treated as equivalent to one another (i.e., dollar values were not assigned to fatalities). Event descriptions in [the table below] that do not explicitly identify a threshold signify that no minimum consequence threshold was employed. This allows the assessment to include events for which the psychological impact of an event could cause it to become a national-level event even though it may result in a low number of casualties or a small economic loss. Only events that have a distinct beginning and end and those with an explicit nexus to homeland security missions were included.
This approach excluded:
- Chronic societal concerns, such as immigration and border violations, and those that are generally not related to homeland security national preparedness, such as cancer or car accidents, and;
- Political, economic, environmental, and societal trends that may contribute to a changing risk environment but are not explicitly homeland security national-level events (e.g., demographic shifts, economic trends).
These trends will be important to include in future iterations of a national risk assessment, however.
If you have questions or comments about this initial effort to share the results of the national risk assessments, please let me know (in the comments section of this post) and I will ask around for answers.
