About RELU-Risk

The RELU-Risk project is part of a major UK research programme, Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) funded by Research Councils UK. Our aim is to improve the effectiveness and sensitivity with which food chain risks are handled, particularly in relation to impacts on the rural community.

In more detail, RELU-Risk aims to design, develop and evaluate participatory processes and tools for involving stakeholders, particularly those in rural communities, throughout the management and mitigation of a food safety issue or risk event, ensuring that full account is taken of a wide range of potential economic, environmental, political and social impacts as well as the more immediate public health related and safety issues. Our specific objectives are to:

1. Use participatory design methods to ensure that the proposed processes and web-enabled risk management tools provide the appropriate information through appropriate interfaces to all stakeholders;
2. develop interactive web-enabled tools to open up national dietary and nutrition surveys and use them in improved quantitative assessment of short and long term food chain risks and uncertainties;
3. develop methods to predict changes in consumer behaviour driven by perceptions of risk and uncertainty, including the influence of risk management and communication activities;
4. develop improved methods and tools for communicating to all stakeholders quantitative information about food chain risks and uncertainties and using them in different types of risk management process including participation of stakeholders and the public, and (in collaboration with other RELU projects) consideration of other factors including economic, health and environmental effects;
5. test, evaluate and demonstrate the improved approaches, including participation of stakeholders and the public via workshops, focus groups and web-sites, in case studies of food contamination and microbial hazards.

Research Partners

RELU-Risk is a collaboration between five organisations each bringing a unique set of skills and knowledge to this multidisciplinary research topic. The novelty of the project lies in its integration of the methods and knowledge from these different fields. Only with these forms of input from both natural and social sciences can problems relating to risk management be effectively tackled.

UniS : Food Consumer Behaviour and Health Research Centre, the University of Surrey

Leading: Predicting Changes in Consumer Behaviour

The overall objective of the consumer behaviour research is to quantify the impact on consumer behaviour of presenting information on risk and uncertainty in different ways. The studies in this project will specifically address the impact on consumer behaviour in relation to each case study of several issues shown to be important from the literature:

• presenting information in the form of risk information compared with direct recommendations for action
• personal relevance of information
• presentation of uncertainty
• numerical/verbal presentation of uncertainty

The methods used will be experimental studies where consumers are presented with information that has been systematically varied and the impact on various dependent measures, and most crucially intention, will be assessed. Each study will be a between-subjects design with different people taking part in each of the conditions. Consumers will be recruited for the studies using advertisements in regional newspapers. The format of each study will be the same with initial measures of demographics and baseline measures of consumption of a lists of foods including the relevant target food; this will be followed by the systemically varied information and then measures of behavioural intention and ratings of the information provided.

Surrey is also providing coordination for the project

IFR : The Institute of Food Research

Leading: Modular Food Chain Models

The overall objective of this part of the research is to build a set of uncertainty distributions for the performance criteria that relate to well defined elements of the food chain. We will establish a coarse grained modularity so that each food and hazard combination can be identified with a series of uncertainty distributions. The modularity will be based on the three categories of control measures that are identified by the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods (ICMSF) – controlling initial levels, preventing increase in levels, reducing levels. Each distribution will provide a quantitative expression of safety for a particular food and hazard combination. We will explore the role of independence assumptions for distinct elements in the food chain models.

• The uncertainty distributions will provide an interface to the NDNS food intake data set that facilitates an estimate of the distribution of food safety within a population. The uncertainty distributions provide a focus for the participation of stakeholders in the assessment of food safety.
• The uncertainty distributions will provide an opportunity to integrate the epidemiological and the process management aspects of food safety quantification

CSL : Central Science Laboratory

Leading: Dietary Risk Assessment

The objective of this component of the research is to develop interactive web-based tools to open up national dietary and nutrition surveys and use them in improved quantitative assessment of short and long term food chain risks and uncertainties. This project will:

• Make the existing CSL probabilistic model applicable to different types of dietary exposure including pathogens and contaminants other than packaging Improve the existing CSL probabilistic model by adding methods for extrapolating to long-term exposures .
• Expand and refine the input and output interfaces to make them suitable for non-technical users .

LUBS : Leeds University Business School

Leading: Knowledege and Communcation of UK Food Chain Risks

The Leeds team are investigating the communication of such food chain risks, and of the science that underlies knowledge of these risks. ‘The food chain' simply refers to the network of producers, processors and transportation that brings the food we eat from farms to our plates. Much of the work done in the field of risk communication often concentrates upon people's understanding of statistical risk information conveyed to them by press releases, the media, information leaflets and in one to one interactions such as those between doctors and patients. However, our research aims to reverse this focus upon ignorance and learning, to instead investigate people's by investigating people 's pre-existing knowledge and understandings of risks in the food chain. Previous work in this area has shown that ‘expert' and ‘lay' understandings of risk are often dramatically different; with lay perspectives frequently incorporating broader concerns, such as political, environmental , or ethical and personal/family concern; while experts tend to conceptualise risk in narrower terms, concentrating closely upon scientific, technical and statistical issues.

We will compare the understandings of food chain risk among a number of groups of people with different perspectives on food and food production, including food scientists; farmers; food industry managers; environmental and consumer pressure groups; and members of the public who buy and prepare food. People with these backgrounds are likely to have quite different expertise, knowledge and concerns about food risks; and the comparison will allow us to then develop communication methods that can perhaps help to reconcile such differences, whilst also addressing the varied concerns that people have. Our findings will also be useful for our project partners. For example, t he teams at York and Norwich are building computer models of the food chain designed to assess statistical risks from various kinds of food related problems. Our work will help in communicating these risks more effectively so people are better in formed when deciding what to do in the face of these problems . It will also inform future versions of such models, so the concerns and understandings of non-scientists can be taken into account.

MBS: Manchester Business School

Leading: Participatory Processes

Research at Manchester Business School focuses on the development of participatory processes. Participation processes are increasingly being adopted to involve people in decisions that may affect them in some way, or that they have an interest in. The project aims to design, develop and evaluate decision support tools and processes for an approach to participatory risk management and communication which ensures that the views and values of all stakeholders, particularly those in the rural community, are fully integrated into the management process, while ensuring that full account is taken of a wide range of potential economic, environmental, political and social impacts, as well as the more immediate public health related and safety issues. In particular, innovative web-based tools, such as online information provision and discussion forums, are to be developed to encourage e-participation and enable a wider audience to participate at all stages of the risk and decision analytic process. The following activities will be undertaken to meet this objective:

• Use participatory design methods to ensure that the proposed processes and web-enabled risk management tools provide the appropriate information through appropriate interfaces to all stakeholders.
• Test, evaluate and demonstrate the improved approaches, including participation of stakeholders and the public via workshops, focus groups and web-sites, in case studies of food contamination and microbial hazards.