Overview

Risk experts have long observed that newly emerging diseases generate complex and sometimes contradictory interactions between attempts by governments to manage disease outbreaks, media coverage of those events and the diverse risk perceptions of stakeholders and publics. The difficulty for policymakers is that the technical risk assessment tools and methodologies they rely on to set priorities, recommend and justify preventative actions and target scarce resources may not always be well attuned to often rapidly evolving public risk understandings and the social and cultural processes which shape these. In the case of pest and disease threats to trees and woodlands, the sudden upsurge in public concern in late 2012 following identification of the Hymenoscyphus fraxineus (previously called Chalara fraxinea) pathogen in the UK took many by surprise. Over a period of weeks, tree health was promoted from being an issue of expert and high level stakeholder concern to a major focus of public debate and media coverage, leading to questions about institutional competence and broader critiques of biosecurity breaches in the live plant trade. The resulting social intensification of public risk concern, if sustained, is likely to have profound implications for the way tree pest and disease threats need to be handled and communicated by government, its agencies and stakeholders (see Pidgeon & Barnett 2013). Concerned publics, diverse in their interests and knowledge, will need to be more widely involved in the policy debates which frame the problem and set priorities if they are to have trust in, and a sense of ownership of, procedures such as Defra’s new Plant Health Risk Register and the technical judgements about uncertainty and risk which underpin these.

At this important moment in government and stakeholder efforts to safeguard tree health in the UK, it is essential that policymakers and risk managers have a better understanding of how different publics view (and are willing to tolerate or seek to minimise) future risks to tree health. We need to know which publics are currently affected by or engaged with tree health risks. We also need to know how their respective understandings of risk develop over the course of outbreaks through exposure to official risk communications, public debate and/or personal experience. As evidenced in the human and animal health fields public risk understandings do not develop in isolation but will be influenced by cultural associations and personal experience, assessments of institutional competence and the historical benchmarking of previous disease risk events. A useful way to conceptualise these interacting influences is provided by the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF), developed in the late 1980s in order to integrate technical analyses of risk with the social, cultural and individual factors influencing how publics experience it. The SARF emphasises the ultimately socially constructed nature of all risk perceptions and lays stress on the dynamic processes through which risk is communicated and interpreted.

In the context of tree pests and diseases, SARF suggests that the way risks are communicated by government and tree health professionals in their role as ‘risk amplification stations’ is important. The nature and scale of media coverage is also likely to be influential and social media is an increasingly important vehicle through which public concern can be expressed, debated and intensified. The way that publics actively interpret and make sense of these communications before, during and after an outbreak - and thus arrive at assessments of the riskiness of their own actions and those of others - are likely to be informed by previous publicly shared experiences of comparable hazards and risk events as well as personal encounters with disease in gardens, parks, woodlands and forests. Certainly the idea that it is this hazard sequencethat shapes public concern, rather than simply interpretations of the issue of the moment, resonates in the context of tree health. We know, for example, that the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak of the 1970s constitutes an important point of reference for many people, as will other recent policy controversies relating to woodlands and forests such as the aborted sale of the public forest estate in 2010.

In order to advance understanding of the risk concerns and interpretations that UK publics attach to tree pests and disease the objectives of the UNPICK project are:

• To develop a social risk analytical framework in order to better understand the nature, extent and likely future development of public risk concerns in relation to invasive tree pests and diseases (WP1).
• To case study three tree pest and diseases in order to document the way risks have been framed and communicated by scientists, policymakers and biosecurity professionals over the course of outbreaks in their role as risk amplification stations (WP2).
• To further document and analyse from secondary sources the role of traditional and social media in the communication and interpretation of tree health risks during these outbreaks (WP3).
• To analyse and compare the resulting public risk concerns and understandings of observing, affected, engaged and general publics in relation to these outbreaks (WP4).
• To reflect on the public engagement and risk communication implications of the work by exploring approaches and  mechanisms through which policymakers, risk managers and communicators can become more responsive to, and engaged with, public risk concerns (WP5).

These objectives will be addressed through five Work Packages.