Kuopio workshop report

This is a report about the joint method development workshop held in Kuopio 12.3.-23.3.2007. An intermediate version of this report highlighting the major outputs was presented to SP1 meeting in London 20.3.2007. This final report (or its main parts) will be presented at least in SP4 meeting in Oslo 16.-17.4.2007, possibly some other project meetings and other events as well. We who have participated in the workshop, in a way or another, sincerely hope that the outputs of the workshop will be considered relevant and useful by the Intarese project members and that they will be integrated into the future work within the Intarese project as seen useful and reasonable.

This report is originally written in Intarese-wiki and is primarily in the form of a web-document, exploiting e.g. hyperlinking to other pages text etc. A PDF-version of this report, including the most important outputs of the workshop, will also be made and sent around for the use of project members.

Introduction (progress of the workshop)

The participating institutes from Intarese (and their representatives) were RIVM (Anne Knol), USTUTT (Alex Kuhn), NILU (Sjur Björndalsaeter), UU (Hanna Boogaard), IC (Clive Sabel) and KTL (Risk analysis group WP1.4 + air hygiene lab WP1.2). In addition we had Mari Vanhatalo from University of Helsinki / EVAHER project and Patrycja Jesionek from TU Delft / Beneris project visiting the workshop for a few days during the first week.

Aims, goals and outputs of the workshop

The aims of the workshop

• to familiarise everyone to the tools that are being used and developed for risk assessment in the participating institutes
• to identify possible overlaps, gaps, and interface mismatchs, and try to find a reasonable solutions to these
• to work together on a specific case study in practice with the existing tools
• to gain practical experience on the tools and methods and identify development needs
• to write a report about what we learnt for internal use in Intarese (or even for external use?)

Issues to be resolved

• What are the methods that will be recommended for case studies?
• What are the tools and software that will be recommended for case studies?
• Which methods and tools will be included as parts of the Intarese general method?
• Will the Intarese general method and its products be totally open access (General Public Licence GPL)?
• What is the most important output for SP 4 and the toolbox?
  • provide a workspace
  • maybe test out methods (e.g. for issue framing) in a draft environment while the design phase is still ongoing
  • We have collected all the necessary parts of an assessment and the corresponding methods and tools - this is a good basis for the needed functionality of the toolbox

Intermediate report to SP1 meeting

The original idea of the workshop was to get people together to work on a particular risk assessment case using the available methods and tools within Intarese. Based on the experiences during the assessment work we were expected to increase our understanding of:

• what are all the relevant parts of integrated risk assessment?
• what are all the methods and tools that we have available within Intarese?
• what kind of methods and tools we are missing?

The role of the case study was thus intended more of an instrumental type - helping to concretize the discussions about the methods and tools. Naturally some expectations were also set for the actual outcome of the assessment itself, although already in advance it was considered a secondary goal.

As was more or less expected, the first week of the workshop was quite a fuss. Among the participants there was no common agreement on what is (or could be) the Intarese framework and what are (could be) the methods and tools to use within it, while everyone also realized there was not too much time and resources to carry out the case study. This resulted in long and often exhausting meetings and discussions of what and when should we do and why. In between the meetings a lot of things were produced in the wiki-pages, although the question of "are we doing the right things?" was often present in the back of people's minds. Anyhow, luckily the weekend break did good to us and when we came back to work on the second monday of the workshop, everything seemed clearer and making much more sense.

What actually happened so far is that the risk assessment case study on Schiphol airport did indeed help us to direct the discussions to deal with the most important issues that required attention in light of integrated assessment method development. The progress of the case study assessment itself was not too great. In fact quite early it already turned out that within the given time and resource limits we could apply the so called "quick and dirty" method if we were to get any real results out of the case study, but this would not probably be of much use considering the primary goals of the workshop mentioned above. Instead we ended up little by little shifting more and more towards conceptual-level discussions about phases of risk assessment and methods and tools available to complete them.

Now, a little more than half-way through the workshop, the most significant outcomes clearly are the tables behind the link above. Despite still being draft versions, the tables could actually be considered as the so far most comprehensive attempt to describe the Intarese method and combining the contributions of different WP's of SP1 within one framework. Also the concept of assessment workspace was introduced as to describe the missing tool that would bind and integrate all the different more detailed methods and tools as well as users to the same "Intarese system". It must noted however, that the content of the assessment workspace -page is still a very early draft.

In addition to the pages linked to above, there are several pages related to the case study that have been created containing valuable information (see also the bottom of page), but for the time being the actual assessment is not proceeding at least until the feedback from SP1 meeting has been received. If a need to continue the assessment further and to more detail shall be expressed by SP1 meeting, we have the possibility to do that. If not, the remaining work efforts will be concentrated more on the conceptual considerations of the methodological framework.

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Jouni's e-mail to Clive moved to SP1 general information page

Noise policy figure and descriptions moved to case study main page