avoideddamage

Avoideddamage is a risk-management term that refers to the portion of potential harm in a given scenario that is prevented or mitigated by protective measures, countermeasures, or inherent system resilience. It is used to quantify how much damage is avoided relative to what could have occurred under unmitigated conditions.

It can be expressed as an absolute amount of damage avoided, or as a percentage of the unmitigated potential damage. Calculation typically involves comparing two scenarios: a baseline scenario with no protective measures, and a mitigated scenario. Data sources include historical incident records, simulation outputs, fault trees, and cost models.

Applications span domains such as cybersecurity, industrial safety, disaster risk reduction, and healthcare. In cybersecurity, patching, access controls, and intrusion detection aim to reduce potential breach impact, and the avoided damage is tied to cost savings and risk reduction. In engineering, redundancy and safety protocols prevent injuries and equipment loss. In environmental planning, flood barriers and land-use planning reduce property damage.

To increase avoideddamage, organizations implement layered defenses, monitoring and early warning, rapid incident response, redundancy, training, and resilient design that reduces consequence severity.

Limitations include uncertainty in estimating baseline damage, changing threat landscapes, and interdependencies that complicate attribution of prevented damage. Avoideddamage should be interpreted alongside residual risk and expected utility.

See also risk mitigation, resilience, damage assessment.