ABSTRACT
This chapter examines approaches used to forecast future scenarios, assess the impacts caused by development, and the risks and hazards posed by nature and human activity. These approaches are often linked with the assessment of economic impacts, notably by CBA (see chapter 5), and often feed into eco-auditing (see chapter 4). For those seeking greater depth of coverage, the following books in the Routledge Environmental Management Series are recommended:
A. Nixon and O. Harrop (1998) Environmental Impact Assessment S. McGill (1999) Environmental Risk Management
Environmental risk management incorporates a range of approaches (including risk assessment, discussed later in this chapter) to:
It deals with multidimensional risks (often involving interrelated physical and social impacts) and demands political judgement to improve the chances of optimum decision making (O’Riordan, 1979; Pollard et al., 1995). There have been calls for these approaches to become more holistic (Harvey et al., 1995), and some already overlap with or are combined together in eco-auditing. There is growing interest in risks associated with global environmental change, including: biospheric catastrophe (unstoppable shift to conditions that threaten human and other life); climatic perturbation (natural or human-induced which threatens the well-being of people and wildlife); reduced provision of basic needs (threats to sustained production of food, access to adequate water, energy, etc.); and pollution (O’Riordan and Rayner, 1991).
