Risk Assessment, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20 Development and Applications of Risk Assessment

20.1 Introduction

This chapter gives a brief survey of the development and status of the application of risk assessment in some selected areas. The survey does not cover all application areas and is far from complete. The survey is from Norway, Europe, and the United States, with a few comments about Australia and Canada. This does not mean that risk assessment is not relevant in other parts of the world; it only indicates that the authors are less familiar with development in these areas.

The sequence in which the various application areas are presented does not indicate any order of importance, but the first two or three areas are presented according to the timing of the development of methods and tools for risk assessment.

A goal of this chapter is to provide some help to learn more about how and to what extent risk assessments are used in the various application areas. For this reason, some important organizations are listed for each application area. A main criterion for selecting these organizations has been the amount of information that can be found on their websites. A starting point for acquiring more information is therefore to visit their websites.

Another starting point for getting more information is to identify laws, regulations, standards, and guidelines related to risk assessment within the various application areas. A brief list of some of these is therefore provided for each area. More information ...