This article reviews the main insights from selected literature on risk perception, particularly in connection with natural hazards. It includes numerous case studies on perception and social behavior dealing with floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires, and landslides. The review reveals that personal experience of a natural hazard and trust--or lack of trust--in authorities and experts have the most substantial impact on risk perception. Cultural and individual factors such as media coverage, age, gender, education, income, social status, and others do not play such an important role but act as mediators or amplifiers of the main causal connections between experience, trust, perception, and preparedness to take protective actions. When analyzing the factors of experience and trust on risk perception and on the likeliness of individuals to take preparedness action, the review found that a risk perception paradox exists in that it is assumed that high risk perception will lead to personal preparedness and, in the next step, to risk mitigation behavior. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, the opposite can occur if individuals with high risk perception still choose not to personally prepare themselves in the face of a natural hazard. Therefore, based on the results of the review, this article offers three explanations suggesting why this paradox might occur. These findings have implications for future risk governance and communication as well as for the willingness of individuals to invest in risk preparedness or risk mitigation actions.

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Resilience management goes beyond risk management to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats, especially those associated with climate change

Our concept of nine risk evaluation criteria, six risk classes, a decision tree, and three management categories was developed to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and political feasibility of risk management procedures. The main task of risk evaluation and management is to develop adequate tools for dealing with the problems of complexity, uncertainty. and ambiguity. Based on the characteristics of different risk types and these three major problems, we distinguished three types of management--risk-based, precaution-based, and discourse-based strategies. The risk-based strategy--is the common solution to risk problems. Once the probabilities and their corresponding damage potentials are calculated, risk managers are required to set priorities according to the severity of the risk, which may be operationalized as a linear combination of damage and probability or as a weighted combination thereof. Within our new risk classification, the two central components have been augmented with other physical and social criteria that still demand risk-based strategies as long as uncertainty is low and ambiguity absent. Risk-based strategies are best solutions to problems of complexity and some components of uncertainty, for example, variation among individuals. If the two most important risk criteria, probability of occurrence and extent of damage, are relatively well known and little uncertainty is left, the traditional risk-based approach seems reasonable. If uncertainty plays a large role, in particular, indeterminacy or lack of knowledge, the risk-based approach becomes counterproductive. Judging the relative severity of risks on the basis of uncertain parameters does not make much sense. Under these circumstances, management strategies belonging to the precautionary management style are required. The precautionary approach has been the basis for much of the European environmental and health protection legislation and regulation. Our own approach to risk management has been guided by the proposition that any conceptualization of the precautionary principle should be (1) in line with established methods of scientific risk assessments, (2) consistent and discriminatory (avoiding arbitrary results) when it comes to prioritization, and (3) at the same time, specific with respect to precautionary measures, such as ALARA or BACT, or the strategy of containing risks in time and space. This suggestion does, however, entail a major problem: looking only to the uncertainties does not provide risk managers with a clue about where to set priorities for risk reduction. Risks vary in their degree of remaining uncertainties. How can one judge the severity of a situation when the potential damage and its probability are unknown or contested? In this dilemma, we advise risk managers to use additional criteria of hazardousness, such as "ubiquity versibility," and "pervasiveness over time," as proxies for judging severity. Our approach also distinguishes clearly between uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncertainty refers to a situation of b...

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The term governance describes the multitude of actors and processes that lead to collectively binding decisions. The term risk governance translates the core principles of governance to the context of risk-related policy making. We aim to delineate some basic lessons from the insights of the other articles in this special issue for our understanding of risk governance. Risk governance provides a conceptual as well as normative basis for how to cope with uncertain, complex and/or ambiguous risks. We propose to synthesize the breadth of the articles in this special issue by suggesting some changes to the risk governance framework proposed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) and adding some insights to its analytical and normative implications.

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