Risk Prevention and Mitigation – At What Costs? ToWhat Extent?

To cope with the broad array of risks and disasters society is facing today, an integrative risk reduction and disaster management approach is needed, which implies vulnerability reduction and resilience increase along the whole risk cycle including prevention, mitigation, intervention, and recovery. As resources are limited, the key question is How safe is safe enough?”, or in other words, to what extent we can afford to protect people as individuals, their assets, the environment, and society in its collectivity as a whole. People are facing numerous interconnected, complex and newly emerging risks. The many different risks like natural hazard risks, technical risks, biological risks, or health risks are often closely linked and resulting in successive impacts. For example the earthquake in Japan resulted in a disastrous tsunami, and created a nuclear melt-down at its key facilities. What do we – do we have to – accept to happen in a disaster, and how to allocate the resources available? These questions are difficult but crucial in risk management. The presentation will discuss the pros and cons of existent approaches for safety levels respectively risk thresholds. A systematic procedure on how to analyze and assess the various risks will be shown and a concept presented which facilitates the selection of the most efficient measures. This approach follows the marginal cost concept, a concept which is based on the monetarization of the different risks on the one side and the possible risk reduction measures on the other side. The monetarization makes the risks comparable, allows to identify the most efficient measures, and provides insight on the remaining risk levels with the measures taken.