ABSTRACT

The field of risk assessment attempts to quantify the dangers of modern technology, to compare them, and to help devise national policies to deal with them. Risk assessment combines the efforts of physical, natural, and social scientists in attempts to identify hazards and measure the frequency and magnitude of their consequences to assist decision-making and enlighten political debate. Risk assessment is often an important part of an environmental or technology assessment. Risk estimation involves the modeling of risk causes and pathways and predicting likely consequences in time and space. The assessment of pure risk involves the analysis of a large amount of data of past occurrences of a series of events, which enables probabilities of occurrence to be assigned to the same events in the future. In the field of decision analysis, which often relies on relatively more available subjective assessments of probabilities in a specific project-oriented environment, the use of the uncertainty sometimes covers what economists would call risk.