A hazard is anything that has the potential to harm a person, the environment or cause damage to property.

Hazard Risk Management aims to identify and control hazards within the organisation and the workplace. It involves correcting all those factors that make the workplace a risky environment.

The most common type of hazard risk management is health and safety risk management which looks at the internal risks that could affect the safety of employees and members of the public. Health and Safety Risk Management helps to protect organisations from lawsuits by providing a safe working environment for employees and members of the public visiting the workplace by removing the hazards that are likely to cause accidents.

The final hazard risk focuses on assets. The amount of money invested into organisations assets is substantial and they hold enormous value towards day-to-day operations. Here we are focused on what hazards (e.g. floods, fire, property damage etc) present risk to our assets and the consideration of how we are going to control them and reduce them before they occur.

Environmental Risk Management

But hazards do not just have an effect on only causing harm to an organisations assets. With the increasing controversy related to pollution and global warming, the protection of the environment is becoming just as much of an important subject. This is why organisations are considering their Environmental Risk Management a lot more than they had previously. Environmental risk management implements controls to reduce and prevent risks to the environment from organisational activity.

When conducting hazard risk management we must also consider those regulations that we must comply with from governmental law and policy. In many cases this will reduce our options for control methods as we may not be able to simply accept or ignore the risk.