Please Note: The content you will see is the actual work product of the QHSR study groups and participants, it is not final, vetted DHS policy.

Homeland Security National Risk Assessment:  Findings and Recommendations from the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Study Group

The goal of the Homeland Security National Risk Assessment is to inform strategy formulation and strategic decision making by the Nation’s homeland security leaders.

The QHSR Study Group determined that the HSNRA will provide the Nation’s homeland security leaders with an assessment of homeland security risks to our national strategic interests from challenges that include terrorism, natural hazards, manmade accidents, disease, cyber attacks, transnational crime, and the conditions or drivers that may influence these risks.  Specifically the HSNRA will aim to provide answers to the following questions:

• What are the principal homeland security threats and hazards that may affect the Nation’s strategic interests?  What are the likelihoods and consequences associated with each identified threat or hazard?  What are the relative risks of the identified threats and hazards?
• What changes in conditions could result in a significant change in homeland security risk?
• Where are the most promising strategic opportunities to manage risks across the homeland security enterprise?  What are the critical gaps in risk management?

The all-hazards scope of the HSNRA presents a particularly difficult methodological challenge, in that the assessment must report risk in a comparative manner across multiple disparate hazards. These hazards vary widely in their nature (random versus intentional), their frequency (determined by data versus rarely observed), their potential consequences (catastrophic versus relatively minor at the individual occurrence level) and sources of important data (historic record versus expert judgment).

HSNRA Methodology

To address this challenge, the Study Group recommends that the HSNRA aim to calculate risk in absolute terms.  Often described as an “expected loss” or “annualized loss,” absolute risk is the product of a frequency (number of events per unit time) and a consequence, expressed in actual units (lives lost, dollars, etc).  Other approaches considered by the Study Group for the HSNRA were relative risk, conditional risk given an event’s occurrence, as well as ordinal and/or qualitative evaluation of risks.  These approaches were evaluated to be inadequate for meeting the HSNRA methodology criteria.

Because the HSNRA is intended to be a strategic, high-level assessment to inform senior leadership decisions, the methodology does not need to provide granular tactical or operational detail; such detail can be provided by assessments with a more narrow scope. Additionally, to support broad decision requirements, the methodology should be simple and transparent to make the results easy to communicate to decision-makers and stakeholders alike.

Given the strategic nature of the assessment, the Study Group recommends an order-of-magnitude estimation of the risk as the most appropriate approach for the HSNRA.  In such an approach, assessments of frequency, consequence, and risk are intended to represent our best knowledge within a factor of ten.  The implication is that the HSNRA methodology will allow for a large dynamic range and strive to identify significant differences in risks, rather than focusing on small differences that may be subject to high uncertainty.  Order-of-magnitude estimates are specifically designed to identify and separate hazards based on large differences between their risks, leaving the work of distinguishing among hazards of similar risk levels to domain-specific assessments designed to produce more precise evaluations.

The HSNRA process will generate detailed analysis of all hazards risk to the Nation’s strategic interests and will communicate that analysis as required by decision makers.  The elicitation, analysis, and presentation of the strategic homeland security risks are critical steps in understanding our overall security posture; however, these analysis products will not serve as stand alones to provide leaders with viable options for risk management.

Risk Management and the HSNRA

Once executed, the HSNRA is intended to support a cyclical process of risk management across the homeland security enterprise, the overall goal of which is to minimize societal harm by avoiding, mitigating, transferring or accepting risk.  The DHS Risk Management Process provides a basis for framing risk management efforts to help decision-makers identify and articulate risks, surface assumptions, assess risk, decide among alternative strategies and activities, and implement and monitor the impact of the actions taken.

The HSNRA plays in all stages of the risk management process, but primarily serves to help identify the problem, assess the risks, and identify potential alternatives for addressing the risk.  While the HSNRA will not develop detailed alternative risk management strategies or monitor strategies once implemented, it will serve as the national strategic homeland security Risk Baseline to support such efforts.