 Hello, my name is Paolo Crivellari, I'm your lecturer for risk communication in the module Human and Organizational Factors. We will talk about models of risk communication. As you see, there are many different parts of the models of risk communication. There are six different parts and the first one is about the definitions of risk communication. We will see what risk communication is. Generally speaking, there are three main theoretical approaches to risk. Number one, risk assessment is also called technical approach. Number two, risk management is also called a political approach. And number three, risk communication is also called a social process approach. Approach number one, risk assessment defines risk in terms of a value-free and neutral assessment of the probability of negative consequences. Approach number two, risk management has some political, social and economic considerations that are taken into account in order to compare different options and produce successful regulatory outcomes. Approach number three, risk communication conceives risk through public opinion and as understood by the public discourse about technology in which mass media play a crucial role. This is just an analytical distinction. It is a theoretical distinction because in the real world in reality the three approaches overlap. But the distinctions we have made are relevant because they allow us to understand one key issue which is specifically that risk communication is linked to a social approach where two things are most important. The first one is that the general public is relevant in this approach and the second one is that mass media play a key role in this so-called social approach. In order to understand what risk communication is, we have first to define what communication is, what risk is and finally what risk communication means. Communication stems from Latin roots and originally the word means to share. So in this concept of communication there is the idea of sharing something with someone. Communication has some features, for example communication has some implicit stakes that are not really visible or explicit all the time and another feature of communication is that messages are often ambiguous due to some ambiguities in everyday natural language. We have now to define what risk is. Generally speaking, there are many definitions of risk. For example, scientific definition of risk or technical ones. We refer in these lectures to manufactured risks. So natural risk or risk caused by nature is not taken into account in these lectures. For example, we don't deal with rogue ways, earthquakes or volcanoes. We will refer to risks that are caused by human activities. So for the purposes of our lectures, risk is conceived as the probability that a substance or a human activity may result in adverse health effects for a given population. We have now to define what risk communication is and for our lectures, risk communication will be considered as a verbal and or written communication between two or more actors, at least two but sometimes many more, which is intentional which means that non-intentional communication will be avoided in these lectures. A communication that is ambiguous, that can have some ambiguities due to natural language and that has some explicit but also some implicit stakes. Risk communication in these lectures will be conceived as something that is intended to inform, to give information to citizens and to the general population, to foster dialogue which means to initiate participatory processes with citizens and which is intended possibly to make decisions for the public good. And this is applied to a technological risk. So risk communication for our purposes will be a peculiar type of communication about technological risks, for example, nanotechnology, genetically modified organisms, base station transmitters for mobile phones or industrial risks that has some goals, for example, to inform, to foster dialogue or to make decisions. In the previous slides, we have defined what risk communication is. In the next presentation, we will see what models of risk communication can be found and we will talk in particular about one of them, the LASUL model.