Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Hazard and risk assessment
The importance of hazard assessment and risk assessment hardly needs stressing in
the wake of accidents like Seveso, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal and
Chernobyl, or natural disasters like floods or earthquakes.
Hazard assessment
A hazard is a perceived event or source of danger which threatens life or property or
both. A disaster is the realization of a hazard (a catastrophe is a particularly serious

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disaster). Hazard assessment may be said to seek to recognize things which give rise
to concern (Clark et al., 1984:501). Hazard assessment tends to deal with natural
hazards: flood, storm, tsunami, locust swarm, etc. Human activities also pose threats
(e.g. crime or technological innovation), and may initiate natural hazards and alter
the vulnerability of the environment, wildlife or humans to them. Some people
therefore divide hazards into into natural, quasi-natural and man-made.
One difficult problem faced by hazard or risk assessment, and to some extent
EIA, is assessing what is ‘acceptable’. Various groups, even within one society, may
perceive and evaluate hazards and risks differently and often vary in their vulnerability.
The perception of risk is often not based on rational judgements: people have gut
reactions to or dread of certain things and little fear of other, perhaps more real,
threats. There are likely to be different risk perceptions from class to class, age-
group to age-group, and for different religions and sexes: much depends on previous
exposure or awareness through the media (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1990; Krimsky
and Goulding, 1992). Perception also varies from individual to individual, and for
any given group through time—e.g. a youthful person may be more tolerant of risk
than someone older; and the poor face and have to accept more risks. In general,
people are more concerned about the short term rather than the long term, and by
‘concentrated’ hazards—an air crash which kills 300 rather than the same number of
fatalities from household accidents dispersed over a country, or in time. Some risks
tend to get more attention (e.g. radiation hazards compared with traffic accidents). If
people think they are in control, as car drivers for example, they are probably less
worried than as passengers in a train. Perception can be greatly affected by media
and myth, and faced with a hazard or risk people’s responses are diverse.
Risk and hazard perception has generated a growing literature from behavioural
psychologists, health and safety specialists, anthropologists and specialist risk or
hazard assessors. The assessor can categorize hazard or risk according to criteria
like: minor/severe; infrequent/frequent; localized/widespread, and may resort to
estimating the value of a life to weigh against risk probability and risk avoidance
costs (the Bhopal tragedy in India raised the question of higher life valuations awarded
to citizens of rich nations). Involvement of the public in risk and hazard assessment
can pose problems: predictions may involve companies that wish to avoid giving
away the fruits of their experience or research, or a government that wants secrecy
concerning strategic information or activity they prefer the public or factions (e.g.
terrorists) not to know about.