Kuopio workshop report

This is a report about the joint method development workshop held in Kuopio (later referred to as Kuopio workshop) 12.3.-23.3.2007. An intermediate version of this report highlighting the major outputs of the workshop so far was presented to SP1 meeting in London 20.3.2007. The main parts of this final report 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 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 have significant influence in the future work within Intarese.

This report is originally written as web-document to be presented in Intarese-wiki and its composition is based on the idea of exploiting e.g linking to other wiki-pages 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

The Kuopio workshop was held in Kuopio 12.3.-23.3.2007. It was organized by the environmental health department of national public health institute of Finland (KTL) and the workshop activities took place in the premises of the environmental health department of KTL. The inventor of the original idea and the main organizer of the workshop was Jouni Tuomisto from KTL with Mikko Pohjola, also from KTL, as the main responsible for practical arrangements.

The Intarese partner institutes that participated directly in the Kuopio workshop (and their representatives) were RIVM (Anne Knol), USTUTT (Alex Kuhn), NILU (Sjur Björndalsäter), UU (Hanna Boogaard), IC (Clive Sabel) and KTL (mainly risk analysis group + air hygiene laboratory). In addition there were two visitors to the workshop outside the Intarese community, Mari Vanhatalo from University of Helsinki / EVAHER project and Patrycja Jesionek from TU Delft / Beneris project during few days of the first week of the workshop. The direct participants took part in the workshop activities for varying times during the whole workshop period depending on the schedule and availablility of each. Most of the participation of the people outside KTL was concentrated during the first week of the workshop, as Alex from USTUTT was the only participant outside KTL during the second week of the workshop.

In addition to the direct participants described above, there were several Intarese partner institutes (and their representatives) who remotely took part in the workshop in the form of planning and giving advice before and partly also during the workshop. These were IC (David Briggs), RIVM (Erik Lebret), WHO (Marco Martuzzi, Martin Krayer von Krauss), UU (Gerard Hoek), NILU (Aasmund Fahre Vik). Also Matti Jantunen and Juha Pekkanen from KTL took part in planning, commenting and observing the workshop activities.

Overall it is fair to say that the workshop had a good representation from SP1 and at least a satisfactory representation from SP4. Several of the direct or remote participants are also involved with a number of work-packages in other SP's and the needs and views from them, SP3 policy-assessment WP's in particular, were thus brought to discussions within the workshop as well. During the workshop, many of the participants also had meetings and held discussions on Intarese related issues, which did not directly concern the workshop topic. The workshop thus had a positive influence in enhancing communications between institutes and work-packages even outside the workshop activities themselves.

Progress of the workshop

As could have been expected, the first week of the workshop was a big hassle. In the beginning of the workshop there was no common agreement among the participants on what is (or should be) the Intarese framework, what is the Intarese general method composed of and what are (should be) the tools to be used to apply the method. At the same time it was obvious to all that there was not very much time and resources to carry out the chosen case assessment where the method and tools where to be tested. This resulted in long and often exhausting meetings and discussions of what, how, when and why should we do during the first days of the workshop. On the other hand it was necessary to try to be practical and discuss the case itself, but on the other hand it was also necessary to discuss the methodological framework and related tools.

In between the meetings the participants worked on studying the data and describing the variables and methods assigned to them in the division of tasks, commenting and discussing contributions of others and raising questions of important issues as well as attempting to find answers to them. Intarese-wiki was used as a collaborative workspace providing the means of documenting and communicating within workshop participants and also to presenting the progress of work to remote participants. Despite all the ambiguities, unclarities and other challenges of the situation, the spirit among the workshop participants remained high and the attitudes productive and constructive. A whole lot of work was done and quite a lot of material was produced in the wiki. Although the question, "are we really doing the right things?" was often present in the back of people's minds and was also brought up and explicitly discussed in the meetings, we seemed to be proceeding, no-one just knew exactly where. The first week of the workshop ended with several open questions and only few good answers. A sense of anxiety and even slight frustration was in the air. A weekend break with refreshing social activities arrived just when it was most needed.

On monday of the second week of the workshop everything suddenly seemed clearer and all the work done and discussions held seemed to make some sense after all. Not all of this change can be attributed to the social activities and freetime however. A major factor behind this change was that Jouni spent some time during the weekend in organizing the outputs of the first week into a framework making it easier for everyone to see the whole big picture of what we were actually working on.

As we were struggling with proceeding with the case study, but had clearly produced something promising concerning the methodological framework, it was a relatively easy decision to concentrate the efforts of the second week in method development at the expense of the case study. Of course this decision was subject to the comments from the SP1 meeting that was held on tuesday of the second week of the workshop and where the intermediate results were to presented. Since no objection to this (slight) shift of focus was presented, the case study was frozen about to the state where it was after the first week. The end of the second week was mostly spent in attempting to translate the contributions of the first week into a tentative general description of the Intarese framework and method.

What actually happened in practice was that the risk assessment case study on Schiphol airport was not finished in the end. In fact, already quite early it turned out that within the given time and resource limits we could only manage to apply the so called quick and dirty method in making the case assessment, if we were to get any real results out of the case study. However, this would not have probably been of much use considering the goals of the workshop (see next chapter for more detailed description). Anyhow, the case assessment was indeed significantly useful in directing the discussions to the most important issues that required attention in light of integrated assessment method development. It is also possible that the case assessment be completed later if seen useful for some purpose. The methodological outputs of the workshop were maybe even beyond expectations.

Aims, goals and results of the workshop

The original idea of the workshop was to get several people from different institutes and work-packages together to work on a particular risk assessment case using the available methods and tools within Intarese. Although there were expectations for the actual results of case itself, the role of the case study was already from the beginning intended as more of an instrumental type, helping to concretize the discussions about the methods and tools. By having people from several institutes and workpackages it was thought that most of the different major aspects and views concerning both the method development and the toolbox development could be identified, addressed and discussed in the workshop.

Aims and goals

Already fairly early in the preparation phase the aims of the workshop were set as follows:

• 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 learned for internal use in Intarese (or even for external use?)

Just before the beginning of the workshop, the issues to be resolved were further developed as:

• 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)?

Results

The main outputs of the workshop are presented in detail on the following pages:

1. Tools needed in Intarese toolbox - phases and steps of risk assessment process, methods and tools available or needed
2. Assessment workspace (Intarese method) - description of the assessment workspace concept
3. Risk assessment on airports - Kuopio workshop case study - Schiphol airport case study main page

The most significant outcomes are probably the tables describing the phases/steps of RA, methods and tools available/needed. 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.

• 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

Implications of the outputs

Most comprehensive attempt to describe/define Intarese framework & method

• boundaries of Intarese method? (assessment- & step-specific issues)
• (lacking of?) coverage of Intarese SP1 WP's? (step-specific issues)
• coherence with other guidance within Intarese? (e.g. SP3 scoping protocol, SP3 assessment protocols)
• purpose -> functionalities of Intarese toolbox? (assessment workspace)
• draft assessment workspace needed? (assessment workspace)

General lessons learned in the workshop

?

Individual comments from the participants

?

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The contents of the intermediate report have been merged to the current text where applicable. The whole intermediate version can be found following the link: [1]

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

Noise policy figure and descriptions moved to case study main page