ABSTRACT
This chapter touches on the major issues regarding communication of environmental risks, and presents several scenarios in which risk communication is important. Risk itself is a difficult concept to understand, even for the engineer or scientist. Can one fully comprehend the fact that each of us has a 0.000035 chance of being hit by lightning during our lives, or that one would need to buy a lottery ticket once a year to have a 0.000035 chance of winning a million dollars? For the public, such concepts are even more difficult to understand. Thus, engineers and scientists may be tempted to avoid involving these non-experts in the process. The chapter covers risk communication related primarily to health risk assessments, emphasizing community outreach, public notification, comparison of relative risks, and analysis of the sometimes large discrepancies between risk perception by the public and that by technical experts.
