In February, the Dutch safety regions adopted a new guideline for their regional risk inventory and analysis: phenomenon analysis, resilience, a living document. The risk profile itself, however, remains what it was: a report adopted once every four years. The two do not automatically fit together. How big can the gap get? The same shipment puts 232 people in the affected zone with one wind direction, and none with another. More on that below.
What changed in February
On 27 February 2026, the council of safety region commanders and directors (RCDV) adopted the Regional Risk Inventory and Analysis Guideline, replacing the guidance that had been in place since 2009. All 25 safety regions, the regional emergency management authorities of the Netherlands, were involved in its development; the Netherlands Institute for Public Safety (NIPV) maintains it.
Seventeen years separate the two documents, and it shows. The new guideline shifts the emphasis from risk estimation to phenomenon analysis, adds a resilience analysis, asks for a systemic view of interconnection and interdependence, and calls itself a living document in which new developments are incorporated as they arise. It is the step the sector itself asked for: the Dutch fire service concluded in a 2023 advisory report that a profile remade once every four years no longer suits a changing environment, and recommended working towards a cyclical, learning model.
One thing remains. The method is now learning and dynamic. The profile itself is not.
Why this matters now
Most current risk profiles are approaching the end of their term, and for many regions the next update will be the first made under the new guideline. The preparatory work starts this year. That makes this a governance moment too: the risk profile is adopted by the region’s general board and underpins the policy plan, capacity decisions and risk communication. What a region sets up now determines how the profile works for the coming policy period. Some colleagues are already acting on it: at least one safety region has appointed a Dynamic Risk Profile project lead, and that term comes from the sector itself, not from the market.
Three speeds in one region
The background document accompanying the guideline lays the update frequencies side by side, matter-of-factly. Operational pictures are updated daily or weekly. Fire and care risk profiles roughly once a year. And the regional risk profile roughly once every four years.
Three products, one region, three realities. And the risk profile is precisely the document in which the other two are supposed to come together.
The friction is sharpest in the new multi-criteria analysis. It looks at every risk type through four lenses: factual impact, probability, perception, and fourthly volatility and unfamiliarity. Under that fourth lens, what counts is whether the probability and the impact are expected to change in the coming years: if both increase, the risk scores a 3; if one of the two increases, a 2; with no increase or a decrease, a 0.
What a dynamic risk profile is
A dynamic risk profile is not a different risk profile. It is the same profile, built as an instrument instead of a document. It replaces nothing in the guideline; it makes the steps executable at any moment rather than filled in once each cycle.
The pattern underneath consists of four layers, identical for every risk type. Only the content differs.
The static framework
What the profile currently contains: the route with its impact zone, the risk contours, the designated areas for fire, explosion and toxic cloud.
Het statische kader
Wat er nu in het profiel staat: de route met het invloedsgebied, de risicocontouren, de aandachtsgebieden voor brand, explosie en gifwolk.
The current situation
What is actually out there right now. Which shipments are moving and what they carry, or what is inside the facility at this hour.
Het statische kader
Wat er nu in het profiel staat: de route met het invloedsgebied, de risicocontouren, de aandachtsgebieden voor brand, explosie en gifwolk.
De actuele situatie
Wat er op dit moment werkelijk is. Welk transport er rijdt en wat erin zit, of wat er op dit uur in de installatie aanwezig is.
The analysis
What that means for the area: the affected zone, the people in it, the buildings and their vulnerability classification.
Het statische kader
Wat er nu in het profiel staat: de route met het invloedsgebied, de risicocontouren, de aandachtsgebieden voor brand, explosie en gifwolk.
De actuele situatie
Wat er op dit moment werkelijk is. Welk transport er rijdt en wat erin zit, of wat er op dit uur in de installatie aanwezig is.
De analyse
Wat dat betekent voor het gebied: het effectgebied, de mensen die erin zijn, de gebouwen en hun kwetsbaarheidsclassificatie.
The course of action
What follows for the profile and the policy behind it: which measure or advice applies, where capacity is needed, and what it means for planning and risk communication.
Once that pattern is in place, every next risk type is a matter of filling four layers. No redesigning, no renegotiating definitions. And because the picture is compiled once, it is the same picture in the cold, warm and everything-in-between phases of crisis management.
Why a few map layers will not do
The first thought is often: we can handle this with a few extra map layers in the existing viewer. In practice, that falls down on two counts.
The affected zone is not a layer
It does not exist until it has been calculated, from the substance, the leak size, the wind direction and speed, and the stability of the atmosphere. A map layer shows a state someone recorded earlier; here, that state has to be recalculated the moment a parameter changes.
Het effectgebied is geen laag
Het bestaat niet tot het is uitgerekend, uit stof, lekgrootte, windrichting, windsnelheid en atmosfeer. Een kaartlaag toont een vastgelegde toestand; hier moet die toestand opnieuw ontstaan zodra een parameter verandert.
Time is not a layer but an axis
How many people are in an area depends on the hour of the day. A map layer is a single moment. To know which situation is truly decisive, you have to run through the whole day and the whole wind rose: hundreds of geometries, and nobody draws those by hand.
Then there is stewardship: every figure that ends up in a board paper must be traceable to a source and a version, without anyone maintaining it by hand. That is precisely the difference between a viewer and a digital twin: a model of the area in which objects, states and relationships are recorded, and on which you can run calculations.
It is also the argument for scale. Twenty-five regions doing the same homework twenty-five times over is exactly the fragmentation the Dutch Inspectorate of Justice and Security warned about in 2025, when it recommended establishing uniform structures and a shared conceptual framework. At a regional boundary, the same incident should look the same on both sides.
Assuming is allowed, counting is possible
The background document is matter-of-fact about it: to estimate the size of vulnerable groups, a rough picture is sufficient, an assumption of the average size. That is a sensible rule. It was also the only feasible rule, in an era when counting was expensive.
That era is over. The hectare statistics of Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the national buildings register (BAG) and the public registers of risk sources and transport routes describe the area for each hectare, each building and each route. The background document itself says as much: a safety region hardly needs to measure anything, because the public information is already available.
What is missing is not the data. What is missing is the instrument that brings the data together and turns it into a picture read the same way in every region.
How much difference that makes is shown in the worked example below: one shipment of liquefied toxic gas along a rail section through a built-up area, one leak size, and only the wind direction as a variable.
And that is only the wind. A business park at three in the morning is a different area from the same park at three in the afternoon, with a different population, different self-reliance and a different course of action.
The conversation with the data owner has changed
For the current-situation layer, a region depends on others: what is actually running, sailing or present is known to the infrastructure operator, the harbour master or the licensing authority. That conversation has recently changed. Since 15 August 2026, around five hundred designated critical entities have been required under the Critical Entities Resilience Act to make and maintain their own risk assessments. Safety regions are exempt from the act, but the obligation lands with precisely the parties regions have been asking for data for years; the guideline now also lists the CER inventory as a source of information. The request is no longer a favour, it is a shared interest. And a working picture that shows in thirty seconds what becomes visible with their data is more convincing than a letter.
Starting small is an option
A common caveat is that the live data is not there yet. That is true, and it need not be a reason to wait.
Maturity grows in three steps, with the same structure underneath each. First, models and assumptions: reproducible, testable, and built entirely from public registers. Then historical series: patterns instead of moments, which is where the volatility of a risk first gets a foundation instead of an estimate. And finally the live picture. Anyone who starts at step one never has to redo anything later, and sees which data source adds the most value before anyone builds a connection.
In practice, it starts small: record the four-layer pattern in a document of a few pages, hold the first conversations with data owners with a working picture on the table, and fill a second risk type to prove the pattern holds.
The pattern and the data definitions should, in our view, be public knowledge: we build and supply the platform it runs on, but the method belongs to the sector. The guideline has brought the method up to date. Now it is the tools’ turn.
See where your region stands
Argaleo Digitwin is the digital twin platform that dozens of Dutch municipalities, safety regions and provinces work with every day. If you would like to see what your own region looks like in a dynamic risk profile, built from public registers and showing your own risk types, you can do so in a single one-hour session. No implementation project up front, no data delivery required.
Frequently asked questions
What is a dynamic risk profile?
What changed in the 2026 Regional Risk Inventory and Analysis Guideline?
What is a phenomenon analysis?
Could this not be done with a few extra map layers in our existing viewer?
What data does a dynamic risk profile require?
What does it cost to get started?
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