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Best practice guidance for the application of VOSL in government regulation of risk.Published by The Australian Government, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Office of Best Practice Regulation.This note provides guidance on how officers preparing the cost-benefit analysis inRegulation Impact Statements should treat the benefits of regulations designed toreduce the risk of physical harm.A number of regulatory proposals are aimed at reducing the risk of physical harm, forexample, occupational health and safety laws, warning labels on tobacco products andtransport safety measures such as seat belt laws. This raises the issue of how to measureand articulate this benefit in a Regulation Impact Statement. Different methods have beenproposed for valuing reductions in the risk of physical harm and this note sets out a methodmost appropriate for the best practice regulation process.

This guidance to UK Health and Safety Executive and local authority enforcing officers appears to be a change in direction for HSE. The theme of the guidance is that it is reasonable to assess the risks from trees without seeking to assess every tree in detail. This document was updated in March 2013, but is not available as a pdf document. You can view the revised document at http://www.hse.gov.uk/foi/internalops/sims/ag_food/010705.htm.

This colour-coded framework is designed to assist tree risk management decisions using the output of a Quantified Tree Risk Assessment.

At Laman Street in New South Wales, an avenue of fourteen fig trees was removed by Newcastle City Council against considerable opposition from local people. Over 12,000 people signed a petition to save the trees; the second largest petition in the history of NSW. At the end of December 2011, Mike Ellison was commissioned to carry out a Quantified Tree Risk Assessment of the affected section of Laman Street. This is the report presented to the local residents group 'Save Our Figs Inc.'.If you would like more information or wish to discuss the case, you can post on the Public Discussion Forum in the 'Tree Manager's Resources' section, or if you are a QTRA user, you can post on the User's Discussion List.

Published in Arboriculture and Urban Forestry 2013. 39(4). The lead author of this paper is Mark G. Stewart, who is Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at The University of Newcastle in Australia. Professor Stewart's biography cites authorship, with R.E. Melchers, of Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Engineering Systems (Chapman & Hall, 1997), as well as more than 300 technical papers and reports. He has more than 25 years of experience in probabilistic risk and vulnerability assessment of infrastructure and security systems that are subject to man-made and natural hazards. The Paper is supportive of the QTRA approach, but identifies some shortcomings. Some time prior to publication, Professor Stewart communicated by email his initial thoughts on some of these issues. The QTRA method was modified accordingly and we remain grateful for this contribution.