ID: 1633
Presenting Author: Matt Horn
Session: 695 - Let’s talk about risk: engaging on low likelihood, high consequence events
Status: pending
Strategies to minimize misinformation/disinformation associated with high consequence events will be addressed through communication, technical approaches, and in the context of other relevant topics.
Let’s face it, oil spills are scary. While high consequence events typically have low likelihoods of occurring, many regulatory, tribal, environmental, NGO, and public affiliates will focus their attention on the impacts of unlikely events. Conversations can become polarizing, with nearly binary (black/white or good/bad) perspectives on topics around consequence. I have served as an environmental consultant for the last fifteen years as a principal scientist, specializing in unmitigated and response mitigated trajectory, fate, and effects modeling of liquids, gases, and solids that have the potential to impact ecological and human health. Working on >100 projects internationally related to on-land and in-water releases, including freshwater (rivers and lakes), estuarine, coastal, and offshore marine environments has given me the opportunity to serve as an expert witness on numerous occasions and lead regulatory, tribal, stakeholder, and public engagement meetings and strategies to effectively communicate complex technical topics around high consequence events that can make news headlines and derail conversations and regulatory proceedings. Strategies to minimize misinformation and disinformation will be discussed including: 1) communicating early and often with all stakeholders, 2) identifying and clearly addressing concerns, 3) identifying modeling approaches for quantitative and qualitative assessments, 4) effective scenario development to bound the problem, 5) discussion of relevant topics including probability assessment, emergency response, engineering & design.
Dr. Horn is a Principal Scientist with Tetra Tech focused on modeling, communication, and litigation. He provides impartial assessments to industry and government to enable informed decision making.