ABSTRACT
In the past there was good reason for using insurance as a one-stop shop for environmental risk management: insurers have learned by experience that it is easy to underestimate environmental liabilities. As most organisations have to carry an increasing share of their own risk liabilities, risk assessment will become increasingly more important to financial management, and thus respectable. Hazard identification is the most important feature of risk assessment because it determines the scope of the assessment. With safety risk assessment studies, the evaluation of probability often provides the most difficult stage. In safety risk assessment, consequence analysis is usually quite straightforward because everything is contained and the elements of uncertainty are small. The main difference between safety and environmental risk assessment comes from the difficulties in quantifying open environmental consequences. Risk assessment and management is a commercial tool of great importance in organisations in all sectors of the economy.
