4. Risk assessment and mitigation plan

Risk assessment and mitigation plan is the 4th step in the responsible adoption of DTs by PAs. At this stage, public administrations should lead a risk assessment to assess which ethical and social risks were already identified in the scope of ETAPAS solutions, using “Risks and risk categories”. Risks are considered here as the occurrences that (1) are commonly considered to be undesirable or have predominantly negative value, and (2) are neither certain to take place nor not to take place. We will be concerned here with the presentation and description of risks rather than with their measurement or quantification.

Based on the identified risks for a certain disruptive technology, PAs need to work on the development of a mitigation plan that allows for negative occurrences to be as minimal as possible, creating a pre-set of actions that can be taken before the implementation of a disruptive technology and possible actions to be taken in case any of the risks become a reality.

At this stage, the ETAPAS platform is an important ally for the risk assessment and possible mitigation actions, as the RDT Indicators Framework has already identified risks and mitigation actions based on a questionnaire. Hence, involved roles already benefit from the identification of potential risks and their categorisation, but needs to identify if any further risks are at stake and develop a likelihood analysis and an impact analysis based on the findings in the previous step. Then, create a contingency plan for the high-priority risks.