ÖRUGG selected to present research at SRA Nordic 2026

The international conference: Risk analysis in the Nordic area in a time of transition was held at the University of Iceland on 1 - 2 October. It was hosted by SRA Europe - Nordic Chapter of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), the largest professional association in the world in the field of risk analysis. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from across the world to discuss current research and methods in risk analysis, risk governance and societal security.

Two members of staff from ÖRUGG were selected to present research at the conference. ÖRUGG is an Icelandic engineering consultancy specializing in safety, fire protection, risk assessment, business continuity and security engineering.

Children as a risk parameter in recovery

Adda Þóreyjardóttir Smáradóttir, MSc in disaster management at ÖRUGG, presented the study “Children as a risk parameter: psychosocial consequence, rights as constraint, and continuity in recovery assessment”. The study concerns children in the recovery of Grindavík, the town in southwest Iceland evacuated in November 2023 ahead of the Sundhnúkur eruption series. Children are usually treated as a welfare matter in the aftermath of a natural hazard event, but Adda argued that they should be a risk parameter within the risk assessment itself.

In her view, psychosocial consequences, children’s rights as genuine constraints on decisions, and the interaction of exposure, vulnerability and response all need to be analyzed in the same way as any other component of risk. Where these elements are absent from the assessment, decisions on habitation,reconstruction and services can be taken without their consequences for children ever being assessed. Bringing them into the assessment produces a picture that reflects the real risk more closely.

The subject was well received and prompted discussion of how children can at once be built into the assessment process itself and given a stronger voice within it.

New methods for national risk assessment

Böðvar Tómasson, CEO and founder of ÖRUGG, presented “From Events to Functions: A Bottom-up Societal Continuity for National Safety”, part of his doctoral research. The paper proposes that national risk assessment be built on the continuity of vital societal functions, with minimum acceptable performance levels, maximum tolerable periods of disruption and recovery time objectives, rather than taking individual events as its starting point.

National resilience has been high on the policy agenda in recent years, in Iceland as elsewhere in Europe, but the discussion has so far lacked a practical approach: A method for assessing resilience in measurable terms and translating it into operational plans for institutions. Conventional national risk assessments describe events such as an eruption, a pandemic, a cyber attack, and rank them by likelihood and consequence. However, they do not answer the question that matters most in a crisis: Which functions must society keep running, at what level of service, and for how long can they be down?

The method was demonstrated with the volcanic events on the Reykjanes peninsula, where disruption to a function, i.e. the geothermal plant at Svartsengi, which supplies district heating and water to communities across the peninsula and has direct consequences for whether an entire region remains habitable. The same methodology underpins ÖRUGG’s advisory work on business continuity and resilience for public institutions and operators of critical infrastructure.

Panel discussion on societal safety

Both Adda and Böðvar took part in a panel discussion on societal safety, titled “From emergency to precedent: what does Grindavík oblige us to change, and what do other island societies already know?”. Together with Icelandic and international experts, they discussed what Grindavík obliges Iceland to change and what other island societies have already learned.

We thank the organizers for a well-run conference and everyone who took part in the discussion. ÖRUGG looks forward to continuing to contribute to the international conversation on risk and societal security, and we welcome contact from researchers and practitioners working on similar questions.

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