The expected consequences of an event in terms of injury, property damage, or other mission-impairing factors; it is assessed as catastrophic, critical, moderate, or negligible.

• A. Likelihood
• B. Severity
• C. Probability
• D. Impact

Answer: (B)

Focusing on the magnitude of harm from an event is the key idea here. The phrase describes how bad the outcomes would be—injury, property damage, or other mission-impairing effects—and uses levels like catastrophic, critical, moderate, and negligible to categorize that harm. That dimension is what we call severity.

Likelihood or probability, by contrast, describe how often the event might occur, not how severe the outcomes would be if it did happen. Impact is sometimes used similarly to severity, but in this framework the defined scale for the consequences is labeled as severity. Therefore, the best fit for this description is severity.