Tree safety management is a matter of balancing the ‘Risk of Harm’ from falling trees with the benefits from trees. Although it may seem counter intuitive, the condition of trees should not be the first consideration.
Instead, tree managers should first consider the usage of the land on which the trees stand, which in turn will inform the process of assessing the trees.
Quantified Tree Risk Assessment (QTRA) applies established and accepted risk management principles to tree safety management in accordance with ISO 31000:2009, Risk Management – Principles and Guidelines, which is published by national standards agencies. By quantifying the Risk of Harm as a probability, QTRA enables the tree manager to manage the risk from tree failure to widely accepted risk thresholds.
Using the QTRA approach, the land-use (people and property) upon which trees could fail is assessed and quantified first. This enables tree managers to determine whether or not and to what degree of rigour a survey or inspection of the trees is required. Where necessary, the tree or branch is then considered in terms of both size (potential impact) and probability of failure. Values derived from the assessment of these three components are combined to calculate the risk of harm as a probability, which can then be compared to advisory levels of risk acceptability.
The method moves the management of tree safety away from labelling trees as either ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’, thereby requiring definitive statements of tree safety from either tree surveyors or tree managers. Instead, QTRA quantifies the risk of significant harm from tree failure in a way that enables tree managers to balance safety with tree value and operate to predetermined risk thresholds.
By taking a QTRA approach to tree risk, tree managers commonly find they spend less resources on assessing and managing tree risk, whilst maximising the benefits their tree populations provide. Furthermore, in the event of a ‘tolerable’ or ‘acceptable’ tree risk being realised, they are in a robust position to demonstrate that they have acted reasonably and proportionately.
