Nearoccurrence

Nearoccurrence is a term used in discussions of risk, safety, and resilience to describe an event that comes very close to taking place but does not become actualized. It is not a standardized term across disciplines, and its meaning can vary with context. In safety engineering, a nearoccurrence might refer to a situation in which process variables approach a critical threshold and a timely intervention prevents the threshold from being crossed. In modeling and probability, it can denote outcomes that lie within a small neighborhood of a target event, illustrating how results can be highly sensitive to initial conditions or parameter values.

The concept is distinct from near miss. A near miss focuses on the absence of harm despite the potential for an adverse outcome, whereas a nearoccurrence centers on the proximity to completion of the event itself. As such, nearoccurrence can be used to analyze margins, tolerances, and the likelihood of a threshold being reached under varying conditions, even when an actual occurrence does not happen.

Examples include industrial control systems where a variable nearly crosses a safety limit but is kept within bounds, or a financial model where a market move almost triggers a threshold-based action but remains just short. Practically, acknowledging nearoccurrences can help designers and operators strengthen defenses, improve monitoring, and calibrate risk assessments.

Because the term is informal and not uniformly defined, its interpretation should be clarified within each specific field or study. See also near miss, threshold crossing, and tolerance analysis.