Risk management has become a dominant concern of public policy and yet the ability of government to anticipate the strength and focus of public concerns remains weak. This has proven to be costly. Rectifying the misunderstandings and assuaging the deep anxieties that surround “scares” and accidents can, and does, cost governments billions of pounds. It is thus vital to understand the genesis and development of such risk impacts. The social amplification of risk framework (SARF) was designed to assist in this endeavor. It aims to facilitate a greater understanding of the social processes that can mediate between a hazard event and its consequences.

The central contention of the framework is that

SARF identifies categories of mediator/moderator that intervene between the risk event and its consequences and suggests a causal and temporal sequence in which they act. Information flows first through various sources and then channels, triggering social stations of amplification, initiating individual stations of amplification, and precipitating behavioral reactions. These also engender ripple effects, resulting in secondary impacts. Within this, the framework identifies two stages.