ABSTRACT
Risk situations are characterized by the fact that we have to make a judgement on the desirability or acceptability of gains and/or losses taking into account that these gains and losses occur only with a certain probability. Such situations are usually so complex that we have difficulties to make a well-grounded judgement or decision about them by intuition. And it is even more difficult to guaranty consistency between different judgements or decisions about risks. Therefore methodological concepts and models to handle such problems have been developed in the last decades which are also applicable in the field of natural hazards. However the attempt to structure these problems logically has shown that they include a number of hard to grasp questions. And finally it proves to be difficult to judge if the application of such concepts and models leads to adequate decisions in the real world.
