Decision Support and Risk Analysis

International research projects aiming at the creation of a scientifically sound, coherent and harmonised emergency preparedness and crisis management approach in Europe have always included SCK•CEN. Through the continuous participation in these international activities, SCK•CEN has strengthened its scientific value and contributed to the dissemination of this scientific knowledge to the stakeholders in the Belgian emergency policy context.

Emergency management related activities are multidisciplinary, and include not only "hard sciences" such as dispersion physics, radiological assessment and dose transfer modelling, but also decision support, information systems, organisational and societal sciences. This has created important links to other disciplines, in particular to the programme of integration of social aspect in nuclear sciences (PISA) and the group Biosphere Impact Modelling (BIS). All the above-mentioned disciplines are present within the group SPS.

Society and policy support is not limited to emergency management, and most of the knowledge, methods, skills and infrastructure are relevant for non-crisis risk governance. Although our group frequently develops activities in other decision support contexts, the major part of the research still is related to nuclear/radiological emergency preparedness.

There are two well established mechanisms of external funding for our activities, on the one hand in answer to demands of Belgian authorities, and on the other hand through international research projects set up in response to research calls such as the EU framework programmes.

The following paragraphs elaborate on four strongly related activity lines.

• Monitoring projects, where radioactivity measurements are executed for the surveillance of the Belgian territory, for historically contaminated sites, for determination of the radiological zero-value, for emergency planning purposes, …
• Radiological assessments, based on the combination of (i) atmospheric dispersion and dose assessment models and (ii) environmental monitoring and measurements, relating to the physics and radiation protection as our core scientific domains, and allowing to perform radiological assessments for a wide range of exposure situations.
• Comprehensive decision support, where results from radiological assessments are integrated into a multi-disciplinary decision framework complemented with concepts, data and tools from radiation protection, radioecology, agricultural sciences, geographical information systems and decision sciences.
• Integrated emergency management, focusing on activities involving stakeholders in the emergency preparedness and response activities, aiming at building a community of experts, emergency managers and responders based on up-to-date scientific knowledge.

Contact: Klaas van der Meer