IRCG
The International Risk Governance Council Framework
A risk is a combination between of the likelihood of potential consequences and the grade of severity of events on humans and/or what humans value. As scientists and non-scietists are confronted by global challenges that can be best characterized by complexity uncertainty and ambiguity, such as pandemics, global conflicts, climate change and new emerging technologies, risk management has become more difficult. The IRCG framework is tryng to make sense of all these circumstances by using five main phases (pre appraisal, appraisal(assessment),characterization and evaluation, management, cross cutting aspects)
Pre-assessment is the process where the main actors involved start to identify the risks (early warnings and monitoring) and begin an open conversation with all the stakeholders. One key component of pre-assessment is the selection of conventions and rules to use.
Risk assessment is the generation and gathering of knowledge in all his dimensions (economical, technological, physical, etc.) to link possible causes, consequences and concerns of the stakeholders to a specific risk.
Risk characterisation and evaluation is the process attributing one or more characteristics (simple, complex, uncertain or ambiguous) to a risk.
Risk management is performed after reviewing all the relevant information to decide the appropriate options to change human activities or/and natural and artificial structures to potentially prevent harm and increase benefits to humans and/or what humans value.
Risk communication and stakeholder engagement are considered cross-cutting aspects that are and should be present in each stage of the IRGC framework as critical components to successful assessment and managerial activities.
SynBio could be guided by the IRCG “precautionary approach”, defined as, strategies that allow learning by small steps and restricted errors. The main rationale is avoiding irreversibility (Klinke and Renn 2002), in this context, potential outbreaks and misuse of the technology through the implementation of a “containment” approach. Aside from the precautionary approach, the IRGC advice some generic risk management strategies such as risk avoidance, risk reduction and risk transfer when dealing with complexity induced problems and uncertainty-induced risks. While risk avoidance can be straightforward such as abandoning the development of SynBio’s technologies, risk reduction offers more and reasonable options such as putting limit thresholds or improving resilience; on the other hand, risk transfer is difficult to imagine as a viable option due to practical and ethical implications. Ultimately, the biosecurity issues of synthetic biology break down in having systems with numerous vulnerabilities threatened by known and unknown hazards.
During the project, we tried to reduce the risk as much as possible by investing our time and effort in the development of cell-free and transcription only technologies that allowed to create a minimal biosensor reducing the number of components and variables when determining the safety of our project. Not only we reduced the number of components but differently from other biosensors that use living organism (modified or not) the cell-free system based on E.Coli extract could not propagate.
Generally, we applied IRCG and risk management principles to approach different aspects of the project like prospected-use, misuse, regulations and lab work. You can find more by exploring our wiki.
- IRGC. (2017). Introduction to the IRGC Risk Governance Framework, revised version. Lausanne: EPFL International Risk Governance Center
Klinke, A. and Renn, O., 2002, A new approach to risk evaluation and management: Risk-based, precaution-based and discourse-based management, Risk Analysis 22(6), December, 1071– 1094.
