My husband John Adams, emeritus professor of geography at University College London, who has died aged 85, was one of the first academics to rigorously explore the field of risk, bridging the divide between data-driven and psychological approaches. “Risk management – it’s not rocket science,” he would say. “It’s more complicated.”
He produced groundbreaking work on road safety and expanded the concept of ‘risk compensation’ – a theory that suggests people adjust their behaviour in response to perceived levels of risk.
He posited the view that everyone has an individual “risk thermostat”, which can frustrate the imposition of safety measures by reasserting the level of risk that an individual was originally comfortable with.
This explains, for example, why motorists drive faster while wearing seatbelts. His 1995 book Risk is considered a leading study on the subject, while his work on the social implications of hypermobility – the growth in long-distance journeys – was even more significant. The risk expert and author Roger Miles called him “one of the greatest (and most accessible) thinkers in our field”.
John was also an active environmentalist, joining the board of Friends of the Earth in the 1970s, battling government plans to drive motorways through London and helping to undercut the then narrow cost-benefit analysis the government was using to choose sites for major transport projects.
His satirical article Westminster: the Fourth London Airport? (1970), for the geographical journal Area, showed that had the commission charged with finding a site for the third London airport used those methods, the airport would have ended up in Hyde Park. While John was not the only critic of cost-benefit analysis, his tough approach combined with an ability to find humour amid the statistics made him one of the most effective at skewering its limitations.
Born in Toronto, Canada, John was the son of Gordon Adams, an insurance executive, and Florence (nee Underwood). After the family moved to the city of Brantford, John went to the high school there. He then received BA and MA degrees in geography at the University of Western Ontario, with an intervening two years teaching in Nigeria.
After completing a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1971, he became a lecturer in the geography department at UCL and was made professor in 1998.
He married Linda Pritchard in 1970 and they had two children, Laura and Tom. They subsequently divorced. John and I met in 2008 through the Soulmates section of the Guardian and we married in 2011.
After John retired in 2002, invitations to speak took him far and wide, addressing groups from oil drillers, pharmaceutical executives and MI6, to financial analysts and parliamentary committees. His worsening health finally made travel impossible, but he was often interviewed by BBC Radio and regularly visited at home by former students and other scholars. He was kind and generous, calling himself a “cheerful fatalist”.
John is survived by me, Laura and Tom, and his granddaughter, Molly. His elder sister, Marion, died in 2022.
