Catalogue of Risks ─ Natural, Technical, Social and Health Risks

The term risk has experienced a dramatic growth in usage over the last few years. This is mainly due to the growing concern about the future of mankind, but also to a greater awareness of the limited nature of our resources. People want to know what can go wrong. In the beginning terms such as risk, disaster, indeterminacy and uncertainty are discussed in detail in this book. Furthermore disasters and risks are categorized into natural, technical, health and social risks, and then major disasters in these categories are listed. Risk parameters are introduced to allow the objective description of risks. The explanation of risk parameters (such as mortalities, fatal accident rates, the family of F-N curves and the concept of lost life years) leads to the quality of life parameters as measurements of risk. In general this parameter permits the comparison of the efficiency of all safety measures over the entire human society. However, limitations of this concept are also disclosed.The book clearly shows the interdependence of risk measures. Safety and risks cannot be discussed only by looking at specific problems, since increasing safety in individual fields might lead to a decrease of safety over the entire society.

Dr. Proske studied civil engineering in Dresden, Germany and London, U.K. He worked in Germany, South Africa and Indonesia, before going into scientific research at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany. In 2003 he received an ESREL award. He continued his academic career in 2005 at the TU Delft in the Netherlands. Since 2006 he has served at the University of Life Sciences, Institute for Mountain Risk Engineering in Vienna, Austria.For several years Dr. Proske has been co-organizer of the Dresden Bridge Construction Conference, which is the biggest conference concerning this topic in German speaking countries. In 2005 the event won the Dresden Conference Award. He is also the founder of the International Probabilistic Symposium/Workshop, which was started in Dresden in 2003/2004 and continued in Vienna in 2005, in Berlin in 2006 and in Ghent in 2007.He has experience in teaching not only Structural Concrete and Masonry and Hazard and Risk Assessment, but also Integral Risk Management in Vienna.