Risk assessment

Policy makers, managers, and the public must frequently assess risks to society and the environment caused by catastrophic flows of environmental fluids as well as the mass and heat transported by them. Examples range from hurricane damage to groundwater contamination and prominently include climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Environmental risk has been succinctly defined as the probability that something bad will occur (Brillinger, 2003). More formally, risk is quantified as the expected loss due to the failure of a critical system (Bedford and Cooke, 2003): R = ∫ ωεΩ L(ω) dP(ω) Hence the environmental risk assessment (ERA) problem consists of the following: 1. Evaluating the loss, L(ω), caused by system failure associated with a given realization, ω, of the system. This is primarily an economic problem.