A root cause is just what it sounds like: the “root” of the problem. Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving that tries to identify the root causes of faults or problems. It helps to identify what, how, and why an event or failure happened. Please describe different approaches or techniques that can be used to find the root cause of environmental and health/safety incidents/accidents. Your report should present a number of techniques including those that are based on Fault tree analysis, Cause and Effects diagrams, Pareto charts and Fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams. The web should prove to be a rich source of useful material on this topic and feel free to include references to how the commercial sector may use similar techniques.
