Risk & Resilience

In a world full of uncertainty, it is becoming increasingly important for people, organisations and networks to be able to understand, measure and manage the risks that they are exposed to. For many organisations, this is about minimising their exposure to risks that could damage them in some way, or rethinking how they do things in order to become more resilient to uncertainty in the prevailing conditions. For others, the very presence of uncertainty, and the taking of calculated risks, can present an opportunity to make significant gains.

Whatever their starting point, top-performing organisations in the public and private sectors place risk and resilience high on their agenda.

The University of Edinburgh can offer a range of unique expertise that can help organisations to optimise their approach to risk and resilience, including:

Risk and Financial Decision-making

• Investment Risk: how investors can understand, monitor, profit from and hedge against exposure to investment risk in their portfolio;
• Credit Risk: how banks and other lenders can optimise their lending portfolio by using quantitative analysis of big data to model and predict borrower behaviour;

Managing Risk in day-to-day Operations, Projects and Programmes

• Using quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the range of internal and external risk factors involved in the day-to-day operations of organisations;
• How leaders in organisations can use risk information intelligently to make robust, common-sense decisions;
• How risk can be understood and managed in the context of complex projects and programmes.

Strategic Resilience

• How people, organisations and networks can prepare themselves at a strategic level to be more resilient, capable of withstanding adversity, and able to recover quickly following disruption;

Social, Political and Regulatory Risk

• How our political and societal lives interact with institutions of all kinds and, in doing so, create and respond to change, risk and reward for individuals and organisations;
• Combining an understanding of the impact of societal change on government policy and political activity with an appreciation of how nations interrelate to each other, corporate and other actors;
• assessing the likelihood and impact of constitutional change in the relationships of the nations of the UK with each other and the EU;
• The impact of risk and regulation in science, technology and innovation.
• Understanding how fragilities within the banking sector led to the financial crisis – and how to prevent another one;
• Understanding the risks and vulnerabilities faced in social enterprise;

Climate Risk & Resilience:

• Environmental risks to infrastructure for example landslides, floods and wildfires
• Understanding the impact of climate change on infrastructure
• When climate change should be considered and quantified as a potential risk
• Informing an infrastructure investment strategy
• The use of climate change models and scenario models for proactive management of infrastructure
• Improve resilience by identifying a systems most likely failure mechanisms
• The link between resilience and adaptation

Geohazards:

• Earthquakes – Natural and induced
• Volcanic eruptions – including the impact on air space.