Quantifying and Controlling Catastrophic Risks

B. John Garrick

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780123746016
• eBook ISBN: 9780080923451
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltwissenschaft

The perception, assessment and management of risk are increasingly important core principles for determining the development of both policy and strategic responses to civil and environmental catastrophes. Whereas these principles were once confined to some areas of activity i.e. financial and insurance, they are now widely used in civil and environmental engineering. Comprehensive and readable, Civil and Environmental Risk: Mitigation and Control, provides readers with the mathematical tools and quantitative methods for determining the probability of a catastrophic event and mitigating and controlling the aftermath. With this book engineers develop the required skills for accurately assessing risk and formulating appropriate response strategies. The two part treatment starts with a clear and rigorous exposition of the quantitative risk assessment process, followed by self-contained chapters concerning applications. One of the first books to address both natural and human generated disasters, topics include events such as pandemic diseases, climate changes, major hurricanes, super earthquakes, mega tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, industrial accidents and terrorist attacks. Case studies appear at the end of the book allowing engineers to see how these principles are applied to scenarios such as a super hurricane or mega tsunamis, a reactor core melt down in a nuclear plant, a terrorist attack on the national electric grid, and an abrupt climate change brought about by a change in the ocean currents in the North Atlantic. Written by the current Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, Environmental risk managers will find this reference a valuable and authoritative guide both in accurately calculating risk and its applications in their work.- Mathematical tools for calculating and Controlling Catastrophic Risk- Presents a systematic method for ranking the importance of societal threats- Includes both Natural and Industrial Catastrophes- Case studies cover such events as pandemic diseases, climate changes, major hurricanes, super earthquakes, mega tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, industrial accidents, and terrorist attacks

Chapter 1. Societal Risks in Need of Understanding and Action

1.1. The Target Risks

This book is about some of the health and safety risks that Hollywood loves to make movies about—global disasters brought about by events such as nuclear war, disease, climate changes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, asteroids, and terrorist attacks. Specifically, this book is about how to analyze such rare and catastrophic risks to better prepare for mitigating, controlling, or managing their consequences.

Why should we be interested in such risks? These are the risks that often don't get taken seriously and yet, they are the kind of risks that could greatly compromise or even terminate life. Many of these risks are beyond known human experience and generally tend not to raise much action from nations and their leaders. How can we get to the truth about risks that are rare and catastrophic and may be even irreversible unless anticipatory actions are taken? How can we possibly manage these risks if we don't really know what they are? Surely, there must be a better way than to rely on the fickle reports of the news media on the “threat of the day.”

What is the basis for deciding what the priorities should be? Are our government leaders, who are primarily driven to deal with issues that coincide with election cycles, in a position to know how to lead the nation and the world on issues that have time constants of decades, centuries, and millennia and are dependent on scientific investigations and knowledge? Is the result of not understanding the risk of catastrophes a leadership that addresses symptoms, not root causes of problems? Is a news media that is primarily driven by the latest sensation a reliable source of information? Where can the public go to get the truth?

Certainly this book does not have all the answers to these questions, but it does suggest an important first step. That first step is to begin to identify, quantify, and prioritize the rare and catastrophic risks to society. The point of this book is that in order to make good decisions on the management and control of catastrophic risks, you first have to quantify those risks. But how can you quantify the risk of something so rare as a modern day global famine; an astronomical event leading to complete or partial extinction of life on Earth; a hundred or thousand year severe storm, earthquake, or volcanic eruption; a terrorist attack that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people; or a climate change that could lead to total extinction of life on Earth? The goal of this book is to provide a method with which to quantify such risks to support better decision-making to sustain human life on planet Earth.

The category of risks addressed in this book is a combination of “existential” risks and risks believed to be rare but of catastrophic consequences. An existential risk has been defined by Bostrom^[1] as “one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.” “Catastrophic risks” will be defined here as those risks that may threaten the existence of the human species globally, but also include risks that may have catastrophic consequences on just a local or regional basis. In this book, we assume an event is catastrophic if it results in 10,000 fatalities or greater. Examples of existential risks are global nuclear war, a runaway genetically engineered biological agent, a large asteroid, an irreversible atmospheric or climate change, or a runaway incurable disease. Catastrophic risks might involve a terrorist attack; an extremely severe storm; a super earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption; a plague; or an industrial accident that could threaten the health and safety of thousands, but not necessarily result in extinction of the species. These are the types of risks that may occur only once in many lifetimes or even many millennia, but when they do occur the consequences can be cataclysmic and perhaps threatening to human existence on Earth. Risks having catastrophic consequences, either globally or regionally are further complicated by often having the property of irreversibility. Waiting for the occurrence of catastrophic consequences through direct experience may be too late to take risk-reducing actions.

Much has been written about risk and how to analyze it to support good decision-making and risk management. A plethora of textbooks, studies, and assessments of risk exists, several of which are referenced.^[2–9] Beginning in the 1970s, the risk sciences started to come into their own—inspired by such issues as the safety of nuclear power plants and requirements for environmental impact statements. We now have the capability to analyze risks better than at any other time in human history. A brief account of some of the roots and evolution of quantitative risk assessment (QRA) is provided in Appendix A.

One reason why we aren't doing much risk assessment on rare events with catastrophic consequences is the lack of quantitative risk information in the public domain. This sets the stage for another risk, namely complacency on the part of society about being able to control such risks. The public does not take rare but catastrophic risks seriously. Why is this? Besides the lack of good quantitative information on such risks, there is the perception that the risks that really threaten us are not the rare catastrophic events that may happen only once over many lifetimes, but risks such as disease, auto accidents, crime, airplane accidents, accidents around the home, and industrial accidents—risks that principally determine individual life expectancy, but not human life sustainability as a whole.

Most people are generally aware of their individual health risks. These health risks include being undernourished, unsafe sex, high blood pressure, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, high cholesterol, obesity, and the use of illicit drugs. Because of the experiential data, insurance companies for the most part already quantify these risks. The more subtle, but rare and catastrophic risks are not so much on people's minds because the present population has not experienced them. These risks have been talked about and in some cases even analyzed, but the results of the talks and analysis have not had meaningful impact. On the other hand, there is Hollywood's sensationalizing of such risks for the purpose of entertainment. The result is more of a “spoof” on such threats than any constructive dialog about their likelihood or consequence. The thesis of this book is that rare catastrophic events will most likely be the major threat to a life-sustaining planet for the centuries to follow and that proper analyses will result in better management of such events.

There is one sharp distinction between “individual risks” and “existential and catastrophic risks.” That distinction is that in general we have excellent information on most personal risks and very poor information on the rare and catastrophic societal risks. We don't need to do more assessment on the risks we know. For example, in the United States of America (U.S.A.) we know^[6] that up to about 40 years old, accidents (primarily auto accidents) are the major cause of death to humans. Somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, cancer and heart disease take over as the greatest threat; after 60 or 70 years old, the dominant individual risk is heart disease. These individual risks are generally not a threat to the society as a whole. Insurance companies best handle these types of risks. They mainly affect life expectancy, not the death or injury of very large numbers of people through a single event as might be the case for a terrorist attack, a super earthquake, a giant tsunami, or a planet-threatening asteroid.

The authors believe that current methods of analysis from the risk sciences exist with which to quantify rare and catastrophic risks and offer the possibility of either their mitigation or at least a reduction of the regional or global consequences. Had humans existed and the risk sciences been applied to rare events some 65 million years ago, we might have dinosaurs roaming our planet today. The same could probably be noted for many other species that do not exist in the 21st century. Thus, the real reason for focusing more on rare but catastrophic events is to be in a better position to mitigate them or at least to reduce their consequences so as to provide greater assurance of continued existence of the human species. Existential and catastrophic risks are where the highest payoff is for the application of contemporary quantitative risk assessment, and it is believed that such quantitative applications can result in extraordinary benefits to the society. “Quantification” in risk assessment is one of th...

Table of contents

• Brief Table of Contents
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Societal Risks in Need of Understanding and Action
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 2. Analytical Foundations of Quantitative Risk Assessment
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 3. Case Study 1
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 4. Case Study 2
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 5. Case Study 3
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 6. Case Study 4
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 7. Examples of Risks Having the Potential for Catastrophic Consequences
• BibliographyReferences
• Chapter 8. The Rational Management of Catastrophic Risks
• BibliographyReferences
• Appendix A. Roots of Quantitative Risk Assessment with an Example
• Appendix B. Supporting Evidence for the Case Study of the Hurricane Risk in New Orleans, LA
• Appendix C. Supporting Evidence for the Case Study on Asteroid Risk
• Index