How to measure uncertainties in environmental risk assassment
2008
Darbra, Rosa María | Eljarrat, Ethel | Barceló, Damià
9 pages, 1 figure, 1 table.
Show more [+] Less [-]Environmental risk assessment is an essential element in any decision-making process in order to minimize the effects of human activities on the environment. Unfortunately, often environmental data tends to be vague and imprecise, so uncertainty is associated with any study related with these kind of data.
Show more [+] Less [-]Essentially, uncertainty in risk assessment may have two origins – randomness and incompleteness. There are two main ways to deal with these uncertainties – probability theory and fuzzy logic.
Show more [+] Less [-]Probability theory is based on a stochastic approach, using probability functions to describe random variability in environmental parameters.
Show more [+] Less [-]Fuzzy logic uses membership functions and linguistic parameters to express vagueness in environmental issues.
Show more [+] Less [-]We discuss the best way to deal with uncertainties in the environmental field and give examples of probabilistic and fuzzy-logic approaches applied to environmental risk assessment.
Show more [+] Less [-]This Study was funded by the European Union through the projects RISKBASE (GOCE 036938), AQUATERRA (Project number 505428) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through the project CEMAGUA (CGL2007-64551/HID).
Show more [+] Less [-]Peer reviewed
Show more [+] Less [-]AGROVOC Keywords
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