Compare methods

	Business Continuity Impact Analysis	Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment
Field	Disaster Studies	Disaster Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2019	2012
Originator	Codified in ISO 22301 business continuity management; ISO/IEC 31010	Kappes, Keiler, von Elverfeldt & Glade (review synthesis); ISO/IEC 31010
Type	Impact-over-time analysis of disruption to organizational activities	Combined hazard-exposure-vulnerability risk pipeline for multiple perils
Seminal source	International Organization for Standardization. (2019). ISO 22301:2019 Security and resilience — Business continuity management systems — Requirements. ISO, Geneva.	Kappes, M. S., Keiler, M., von Elverfeldt, K., & Glade, T. (2012). Challenges of analyzing multi-hazard risk: a review. Natural Hazards, 64(2), 1925-1958.
Aliases	Business Impact Analysis, BIA, Continuity Impact Assessment, Disruption Impact Analysis	Multi-Risk Assessment, Multi-Hazard Analysis, Combined Hazard Risk Assessment, Multi-Peril Risk Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Business continuity impact analysis, usually called business impact analysis or BIA, is the process of determining how the impact of disrupting an organization's activities grows over time and using that understanding to set recovery priorities and targets. Rather than asking what might go wrong — the job of risk assessment — the BIA asks what it would cost the organization if a given activity stopped, for an hour, a day, a week, and how quickly each activity must therefore be restored. ISO 22301, the international standard for business continuity management systems, makes the BIA a foundational requirement: it drives the recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives and resource requirements on which continuity plans are built. ISO/IEC 31010 situates impact analysis within the broader family of risk-assessment techniques. The BIA's distinctive contribution is its focus on time: impact is not a single figure but a curve that rises as a disruption lengthens.	Multi-hazard risk assessment estimates and compares the risk that several distinct hazards pose to a shared set of people and assets, rather than studying each peril in isolation. Building on the risk-science convention that risk is the product of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, the approach characterizes each hazard's intensity-frequency behavior, overlays a common exposure inventory, applies hazard-specific vulnerability functions, and then aggregates the resulting losses across hazards. Kappes, Keiler, von Elverfeldt and Glade's 2012 review in Natural Hazards set out the central difficulties: hazards differ in their spatial footprint, return period, and measurement units, and they can interact through cascades and coincidences, so a defensible multi-hazard assessment must harmonize incompatible inputs and explicitly model how perils relate. ISO/IEC 31010 places the method within the standard toolbox of risk-assessment techniques used to support prioritization and treatment decisions.