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The purpose of this paper is to outline the process of risk assessment for terrorists and violent political extremists and to present an example of such an approach. The approach proposed is referred to as the VERA 2 or violent extremism risk assessment protocol (Consultative Version 2).

A review of the knowledge base relating to risk assessment and risk assessment methodology was undertaken with a focus on relevance to individual terrorists and violent extremists. The need for a specific approach for the risk assessment of terrorists that differs from approaches used for ordinary violent criminals was identified. A model that could be used for the risk assessment of terrorists was identified with pertinent risk indicators. This was structured into a protocol referred to as the VERA (Consultative Version 2). The approach is intended to be applied to different types of violent extremists, terrorists and unlawful violent offenders motivated by religious, political or social ideologies.

First, risk assessments of adjudicated terrorists and violent extremists should be undertaken with risk indicators that are relevant to ideological motivated violence. Indicators used for ordinary common violence differ in substantive ways from those relevant to terrorists and therefore may have questionable relevance for the assessment of risk in terrorists. Second, it is possible to construct an evidence‐based risk assessment approach for the range of violent extremists and terrorists using a structured professional judgment approach with pertinent risk indicators. The VERA 2 is an example of this type of risk assessment protocol for terrorists and unlawful violent extremists.

Risk assessment tools that have been developed for ordinary violent criminals and members of organised criminal gangs should be used with caution with terrorists, violent extremists and other perpetrators of ideologically motivated unlawful violence. Specific risk assessment approaches for terrorists with relevant indicators should be used. At this time, terrorist oriented approaches such as the VERA 2 are to be considered consultative and used as an add‐on to other established approaches.

There are few transparent, structured risk assessment approaches that use indicators specifically relevant to violent political extremists and terrorists. One new approach, the VERA 2 is outlined in the paper using risk indicators that differ in substantive ways from those used for other ordinary violent criminals.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a building performance (BP) rating tool concerning the health and safety risk of building users in higher educational buildings (HEB). This paper presents the findings of a preliminary survey, which is the establishment of performance-risk indicators (PRIs) as an initial construct for the development of BP rating tool. The construct items consist of three criteria as the main focus, namely performance element, risk frames and the indicators.

This paper adopts a qualitative approach to achieve the outcome for the preliminary survey. The determinants of the indicators were preliminarily compiled from literature and previous established BP evaluation (BPE) schemes. The initial construct of indicators are then further confirmed through semi-structured interviews involving 18 building operators in Malaysia’s public university buildings. Their views are needed to obtain suitability of the listed indicators for BP rating assessment to be used in the local HEB. The transcription and interpretation from the interview findings are carried out using Atlas.ti© qualitative software.

The interpretation of the interview findings has supported the justification for this paper that there is no proactive action in executing BP assessment to mitigate risk towards users’ health and safety. The findings also revealed that there are 26 indicators that are rated as suitable to be used for the local context of Malaysia’s HEBs. The indicators are categorised under three performance elements, which are functional performance (FP), technical performance (TP) and indoor environmental performance (IEP).

Because the chosen building sample is HEBs, the indicators may not be generalised as the suitability of the items were determined from the respective operators. Therefore, it is recommended that further research is carried out for other types of buildings.

The proposed PRIs have a significant role in the building maintenance and management in HEBs. The result is able to suggest methods for the management to improve and optimise the BP aspects by focusing occupants’ health and safety risk as a reactive process.

This paper highlights the benefits of integrating two previously separate fields: BP and risk management (RM) and, thus, helps providing opportunities for improvement of BP and the relationships with risk and satisfaction of the users. It may initiate a new perspective in optimising the BP and mitigating the health, safety and environmental risk by sensitivity to changing needs of occupants in HEB.

Customs risk management has been widely recognized as a powerful tool to balance between trade facilitation and revenue maximization. However, most customs administrations worldwide, particularly in developing countries, are suffering from a lack of experience and knowledge to assess their risk management systems for revenue protection (RP). Customs risk management has a very limited legacy in the literature. Academic research is quite scarce and very limited, although its relevance to customs administrations. This paper aims to identify the key risk profiles and indicators that contribute to the protection of customs revenue and investigate the role of these risk profiles and indicators on customs RP using the case of Jordan Customs.

This study adopts a panel data approach by using the case of Jordan Customs. Data were collected from the risk targeting and selectivity system at Jordan Customs for the year 2019, a total of 600 observations.

The findings show that all risk targeting criteria except random selectivity (RS) and HS code have a significant positive association with RP. The findings also revealed that RS is an effective tool to prevent traders with fraud and offenses history from a prediction of targeting patterns and to assess the traders’ compliance and make sure their declarations are free from fraud or offenses. Moreover, the findings of this study indicate that customs administrations should adopt alternative programs such as authorized economic operator and post clearance audit as an effective means to measure and improve compliance.

The main contribution of this study lies in proposing a model to assist customs administrations in assessing the performance of risk management systems to protect revenue. This model provides a comprehensive conceptualization and explanations necessary for numerous aspects of risk management projects and it assists to predict the outcomes based on formulated indicators.

This study provides guidelines for risk analysts on how to identify and assess the key risk profiles and indicators that effect on maximizing the detection of revenue leakage and to obtain interpretable and predictable results. In addition, the findings of this study will assist customs administrations in supporting revenue collection, minimizing uncertainty, allocating resources more effectively to target high-risk consignments, while simplifying the procedures for the safe consignments.

This paper is of significant value because it is one of the preliminary studies that empirically identify the risk indicators/profiles that contribute to the protection of revenue and investigate the predictive power of these risk indicators/profiles as a key predictor to protect customs revenue.

This paper aims to examine whether the disclosure obligations in areas of water stress required under the revised Global Reporting Initiative standard (GRI) 303 Water and Effluents, 2018 will improve the quality of corporate water reporting. As a key new requirement is to disclose the impact of water withdrawals from (and discharges to) areas experiencing water stress, the authors examine the ambiguity of the term “water stress” and the extent to which following the GRI’s guidance to use the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas and/or the Water Risk Filter will enable quality corporate water reporting.

The study is informed by the notion of public interest reporting, on the basis that the provision of contextual water information is in the public interest. To explore the ambiguity of the term “water stress”, the authors conduct a semi-systematic review of hydrology literature on water stress and water stress indices. To explore the efficacy of using the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas and/or the Water Risk Filter, the authors review the operation and underlying data sources of both databases.

The term “water stress” has a range of definitions and the indicators of water stress encompass a wide variety of differing factors. The Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas and the Water Risk Filter use a combination of different risk indicators and are based on source data of varying quality and granularity. Further, different weightings of water risk information are available to the user, which yield different evaluations of water stress. A variety of approaches are permitted under GRI 303.

Effective implementation of GRI 303 may be impeded by the ambiguity of the term “water stress”, varying quality and availability of the water stress information and the fact that different water stress calculation options are offered by the water databases. The authors suggest that the GRI closely monitor compliance, implementation approaches and scientific developments in relation to the water stress requirements with a view to providing further guidance and improving future iterations of the standard.

Whilst there have been many calls for improved contextual water reporting, few previous studies have explored the challenges to implementing reporting requirements related to the determination of “water stress”.

Energy commodities are characterised by rigid demand and high price volatility, linked to many variables such as climate factors, exchange rates, availability of resources. At the same time, the authorities often set prices, so wholesale energy companies need to create margins carefully by managing the procurement process and selecting appropriate tools to manage the risks associated with the volatility of energy prices. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and evaluate price and volume risks in the energy procurement process considering a “non-speculative” point of view, which is understudied in the literature review.

The paper adopts a quantitative approach to risk evaluation, based on accounting indicators, and applies it to a large Italian energy wholesale company.

A set of key risk indicators to measure price and volume risks is presented in the results, split into synthesis risk, unbalanced risks, modulation risks and risks derived from bilateral contracts. These indicators are applied to the case study, and each risk is prioritised and discussed.

This contribution is one of the first attempts to analyse energy procurement risks in a non-speculative approach. The proposed method allows: first, to evaluate and prioritise the three major types in the energy procurement process, second, to observe the trend of risk exposure, third, the performance measurement of the procurement process, and fourth, benchmarking activities if widely implemented in the energy sector.

The identification of the main risk triggers is essential for the hospital’s survival and performance with direct effects on its patients’ health and well-being. For this reason, in this paper some of the most important risk categories have been determined. While in a previous research a qualitative analysis has been done for determining which are the most important risks felt by the patient that are believed to affect their health through the usage of a questionnaire and through conducting a confirmatory factor analysis, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the quantitative side of these risks’ presence in a hospital.

On this purpose, four main categories of risks have been considered (the same as in the qualitative research) and they have been analyzed from the hospital’s point of view – through the usage of the hospital financial and internal documents. Therefore, a series of indicators have been determined for each risk category. After that, a representative indicator has been selected and the grey incidence analysis has been conducted.

By comparing the results gathered form this study with the qualitative analysis conducted among the patients (Delcea et al., 2016) it can be said that there can be seen a difference among the way a hospital and a patient perceive the risks within a medical activity. While for the hospital, the most affecting risk is the technological and hospital conditions risk, for the patients the most affecting risk seems to be the human resources and clinical risk. The mismanagement risk and inability to treat patients is the second in intensity for both the hospital and patients, with a smaller value in the patients’ case.

From here, the research can be extended for capturing the risks that are considered to be important for the medical stuff, which will permit us to have a global image over the healthcare risks. After that, a comparative analysis among the hospitals with different financial performance can be conducted in order to see how these risks are affecting their performance and to determine which can be the decisions that can fostering the reduction of these risks.

The present paper offers a quantitative analysis from the hospital’s point of view using the advantages offered by the grey systems theory. Combining this analysis with a qualitative one conducted on the patients, the managers of the hospital can a have a more adequate view over the risks that they are facing with. In this context, grey systems theory offers the needed methods for dealing with such situations.

This study provides a safety prewarning mechanism, which includes a comprehensive risk assessment model and a safety prewarning system. The comprehensive risk assessment model is capable of assessing nine safety indicators, which can be categorised into workers’ behaviour, environment and machine-related safety indicators, and the model is embedded in the safety prewarning system. The safety prewarning system can automatically extract safety information from surveillance cameras based on computer vision, assess risks based on the embedded comprehensive risk assessment model, categorise risks into five levels and provide timely suggestions.

Firstly, the comprehensive risk assessment model is constructed by adopting grey multihierarchical analysis method. The method combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the grey clustering evaluation in the grey theory. Expert knowledge, obtained through the questionnaire approach, contributes to set weights of risk indicators and evaluate risks. Secondly, a safety prewarning system is developed, including data acquisition layer, data processing layer and prewarning layer. Computer vision is applied in the system to automatically extract real-time safety information from the surveillance cameras. The safety information is then processed through the comprehensive risk assessment model and categorized into five risk levels. A case study is presented to verify the proposed mechanism.

Through a case study, the result shows that the proposed mechanism is capable of analyzing integrated human-machine-environment risk, timely categorising risks into five risk levels and providing potential suggestions.

The comprehensive risk assessment model is capable of assessing nine risk indicators, identifying three types of entities, workers, environment and machine on the construction site, presenting the integrated risk based on nine indicators. The proposed mechanism, which adopts expert knowledge through Building Information Modeling (BIM) safety simulation and extracts safety information based on computer vision, can perform a dynamic real-time risk analysis, categorize risks into five risk levels and provide potential suggestions to corresponding risk owners. The proposed mechanism can allow the project manager to take timely actions.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for identifying various inbound supply-risk factors and analyzing its indicators considering the contextual relationship between them. This study additionally proposes a framework for developing an overall inbound supply-risk score considering a real-life case of the electronics supply chain (ESC) in the Indian context.

In total, 32 risk indicators are identified by a systematic literature review approach and are validated by supply chain practitioners/experts and further categorized into six main risk factors. A hybrid multi-criteria decision-making-based DANP (DEMATEL and ANP) framework is employed to develop the overall inbound-supply-risk score (ISRS) and to prioritize the risk indicators. Indian ESC is chosen as a viable case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

The outcomes from the study reveal that the overall ISRS in the ESC is 36 percent and additionally forewarns critical inbound-supply-risk factors such as supplier performance, product, and buyer organization. Further, the study also identifies the most significant risk indicators such as price margin, investment, on-time delivery, order fulfillment and design changes for ESC.

Supply chain practitioners can adopt this framework as a useful inbound supply-risk assessment tool. Moreover, the hybrid framework will address subjectivity and interrelations among various factors through experts’ judgments. The results will assist the managers to have better insights on the critical risk factors and their complicated interrelationships and further strategize action plans to nullify the impact of incoming risks. This study mainly focused on risk identification and assessment of electronics inbound-supply-risk indicators in the Indian context. The framework can be used for other manufacturing and service industries, albeit the results derived are in the context of a developing country.

This paper provides an effective risk assessment framework for the supply chain practitioners/managers to develop a decision-support system for inbound-supply-risk quantification and prioritization of risk factors in the context of the ESC.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to assess and rank the financial risk of a municipal government (“municipality”). Financial risk is the likelihood that a municipality will experience financial distress.

Logistic regression is used with financial indicators to assess the level of financial risk. Then, the municipalities are ranked according to their financial risk. As predictor variables for the regression model, indicators are used that were developed by a Pennsylvania state agency to monitor the financial condition of municipalities.

Financial risk is positively associated with debt service, population, tax effort, and public service on roadways, while negatively correlated with intergovernmental revenues, operating position, user charges, capital outlays, fund balances, and tax revenue concentration. The financial risk model is able to correctly classify up to 99 percent of municipalities as either at risk or not at risk of financial distress.

The financial risk model was developed using data from one state in the USA. Further research is needed to test the model’s application to other states and countries.

Financial risk is on the rise since the Great Recession. This study may be used by municipal managers, citizens, creditors, and regulators to assess and rank the financial risk of a municipality.

This study provides a method of classifying municipalities as either at risk or not at risk of financial distress. Previous models of the financial condition of municipalities do not provide a method of assessing and ranking financial risk.

This study proposes a straightforward set of performance measurements for industrialized nations. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, the paper explores the notion of ranking nations based on food safety performances, beyond benchmarking. The paper appraises how a global comparative analysis could contribute to best practices and continuance improvement in food safety. Second, this paper presents an experiment in which a group of regulators took part in a workshop held in Helsinki, Finland in the Fall 2011.

A session was held in October 2011 in Helsinki, and many countries were invited. A total of 17 countries were represented. The following countries were represented: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA. The session was designed to be informative, interactive and flexibly tailored to the delegates' needs and experience. It was also designed to raise awareness and understanding of benchmarking and supra-national ranking systems, what it is and how it can be applied using practical examples from healthcare and across other sectors.

The session also introduced the principles of process thinking and illustrated how process benchmarking can be a useful tool for continuance improvement. The session then built upon the theory presented in the introductory portion by focusing specifically on the essence of ranking indicators. In this session, delegates spent time familiarizing themselves with indicators provided by the University of Guelph, discussing how they might implement it within their individual nations and across the trust as a whole.

The collection of primary data was also debated at the session. Public trust, for example, could easily be an indicator which could be included. Measurement of public trust in food safety might be important for governments. It could provide them with information on the performance of the food safety systems from a consumers' perspective. To be an effective indicator of performance the measurement of public trust in food safety should be liable to change. Therefore, changes in performance of the food safety systems have to be reflected through the measurement of public trust in food safety.

The Helsinki session is believed to be the first international meeting in which benchmarking metrics were discussed in order to rank countries based on food safety risk practices. Ranking programs in food safety remain controversial. Most particularly, risk assessors and the public service remain skeptical about their effectiveness. The Helsinki meeting was not met to alleviate the skepticism around ranking systems, but it did allow many to better appreciate several perspectives from around the world.