ABSTRACT
Policy makers, managers, and the public must frequently assess risks to society and the environment caused by catastrophic žows of environmental žuids as well as the mass and heat transported by them. Examples range from hurricane damage to groundwater contamination and prominently include climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Environmental risk has been succinctly deŸned as the probability that something bad will occur (Brillinger, 2003). More formally, risk is quantiŸed as the expected loss due to the failure of a critical system (Bedford and Cooke, 2003):
R L P=
∫ ( ) ( )ω ω ω
Hence the environmental risk assessment (ERA) problem consists of the following:
1.Evaluatingtheloss,L(ω),causedbysystemfailureassociatedwithagivenrealization,ω,ofthesystem.›isis primarily an economic problem.
