Aspects of risk assessment in power-law distributed natural hazards
نویسنده
چکیده
Risk assessment is mainly based on certain scenarios involving an event of a certain size which is thought to be characteristic for the considered type of hazard. However, many natural hazards extend over a wide range of event sizes, and some of them are even free of characteristic scales. An expression for the risk taking into account various event sizes is derived, and its implications on risk assessment for earthquakes, forest fires, landslides, and rockfalls are discussed. Under simple assumptions on the damage as a function of the event size, it turns out that the total risk is governed by either the small number of large events or the majority of small events. The distinction between these two classes depends on both the power-law exponent of the event size distribution and the damage function. For earthquakes, forest fires, and rockfalls, the total risk is mainly constituted by the largest events, while results are non-unique for landslides. 1 From hazard to risk assessment Risk assessment is a straightforward extension of hazard assessment towards economic sciences. While hazard assessment concerns the probability of occurrence of a certain event, risk assessment takes into account its effects on life, civilization, and economics, too. Although the term risk has several meanings in everyday life, there is a more or less unique definition of risk in the context of natural and man-made hazards. Let N be the expected (mean) number of events of a certain type in a certain region and time interval. Determining this number, perhaps including its spatial and temporal variation and its dependence on environmental conditions, is the main goal of hazard assessment. Let further D be the expected damage caused by an event of the considered type. The risk R is then defined by
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تاریخ انتشار 2004