Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management (Ecology, Biodiversity and Conservation)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 1/5/2010
EAN 9780521543019, ISBN10: 0521543010
Paperback, 504 pages, 20.8 x 13.7 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Values, history and perception
2. Kinds of uncertainty
3. Conventions and the risk management cycle
4. Experts, stakeholders and elicitation
5. Conceptual models and hazard assessment
6. Risk ranking
7. Ecotoxicology
8. Logic trees and decisions
9. Defining and eliciting intervals
10. Monte Carlo
11. Inference, decisions, monitoring and updating
12. Decisions and risk management
References
Index.
'This book is a must for all in resource management …' Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand
'… aimed at a high level, graduate or higher, audience … a clear assessment of relevant theories and the concepts required both to understand and undertake qualitative and quantitative risk assessments, and then to make realistic decisions from those assessments.' Journal of Biomedical Education