Risk Assessment: Theory, Methods, and Applications

CHAPTER 17

DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS OF RISK ASSESSMENT

… what we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.

—George Bernard Shaw

17.1 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 author is not 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 also 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 Internet pages. A starting point for acquiring more information is therefore to visit their Internet pages. More information and links to these and other organizations may be found on the book's homepage, http://www.ntnu.edu/ross/books/risk.

Another starting point for ...