BACKGROUND The field of risk assessment has focused on protecting the health of individual people or populations of wildlife from single risks, mostly from chemical exposure. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently began to address multiple risks to communities in the "Framework for Cumulative Risk Assessment" [EPA/630/P02/001F. Washington DC:Risk Assessment Forum, U.S. Environmental ...

introduction: iran is constantly exposed to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and drought. in the meantime, drought is the major natural disaster which leads to numerous losses in agriculture and water resources, and this phenomenon is slow and creeping.available evidence suggests that drought management is based on crisis management. as the present management in our country is base...

Groundwater management and protection has been facilitated by computational modeling of aquifer vulnerability and monitoring aquifers using groundwater sampling. The DRASTIC (Depth to water, Recharge, Aquifer media, Soil media, Topography, Impact of vadose zone media, and hydraulic Conductivity) model, an overlay and index GIS model, has been used for groundwater quality assessment because it r...

This paper explores how transdisciplinary knowledge integration can be facilitated in the context of integrated assessments (IAs) and vulnerability assessments (VAs) of climate change. Even though knowledge from a wide range of natural and social science disciplines must be integrated in such transdisciplinary assessments (TAs), the actual process of integration is rarely addressed explicitly a...

introduction one of the most vulnerable water resources against contamination is ground water table. these resources are exposed to contamination in various forms. identifying and controlling contamination in these resources are more difficult and costly than surface waters. also because of the persistence of contamination in these resources, the best way to prevent their contamination is to id...

We present an interdisciplinary effort in the field of global environmental change, related to the understanding of the concept of “vulnerability”. We have used functional programming to capture the generic aspects of the myriad of definitions of vulnerability, and have used the resulting formalisation to learn something new about vulnerability and to write some better software for vulnerabilit...

—Security vulnerabilities play an important role in network security. With the development of the network and the increasing number of vulnerabilities, many Quantitative Vulnerability Assessment Standards (QVAS) was proposed in order to enable professionals to prioritize the most important vulnerabilities with limited energy. However, it is difficult to apply QVAS manually due to the large num...

While some situations clearly may require bringing in highly skilled resources to test systems, a sound basis for good security would be to develop in-house expertise in vulnerability testing by the system administrators, and to develop an effective method of performing testing. The challenge for this effort, then, is to combine freeware tools with a methodology for using them that effectively ...

Climate change is occurring in the Southeastern United States, and one manifestation is changes in frequency and intensity of extreme events. A vulnerability assessment is performed in the state of Georgia (United States) at the county level from 1975 to 2012 in decadal increments. Climate change vulnerability is typically measured as a function of exposure to physical phenomena (e.g., droughts...