www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America T number of marine reserves is growing worldwide (Wood et al. 2008), so it is prudent to consider how to assess whether such reserves achieve their goals. The stated goals of marine reserves vary widely, but fundamentally all reserves are designed to achieve some combination of preserving biodiversity and supporting sustainable fish...

Eliciting the utility of a decision maker is difficult. In this paper, we develop a flexible decision making framework, which uses the concept of utility robustness to address the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency in utility assessments. The ideas are developed by giving a probabilistic interpretation to utility and marginal utility functions. Boundary and additional conditions are used to...

Public workfare programs have been important counter-cyclical program interventions in both developed and developing countries. In the developing world generally and in Africa and Asia particularly, public works programs have been significant policy instruments for mitigating the negative effects of climatic and systemic risks on poor farmers and unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The paper fi...

FOR GEOLOGICAL DISPOSAL OF NUCLEAR WASTE Some aspects regarding the reliability of risk assessments for geological disposal of nuclear waste are investigated. The input for the study is given by the opinions of some interviewed Dutch experts and existing literature. The Dutch risk assessment PROSA is used as an example, but the conclusions are seen to be valid more generally. In the PROSA study...

When a crisis occurs, such as a fire in a chemical facility, difficult decisions need to be made based on assessment of risk. Is it safe enough for responders to enter the area? Do we need to evacuate the public from the nearby area? Assessing risks may require information from a number of different sources, as well as collaboration across organizations and management levels. In this paper we p...

In response to the devastation of recent hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, this research identifies small businesses as being at-risk of failing if they experience a data loss caused by a community-wide natural disaster. Practitioner-oriented literature is reviewed to identify relevant disaster recovery components that are classified within a risk management framework. A Delphi study is conducted a...

Risk assessments for natural hazards are becoming more widely used and accepted. Using an extended definition of risk, it becomes obvious that performant procedures for vulnerability assessments are vital for the success of the risk concept. However, there are large gaps in knowledge about vulnerability. To alleviate the situation, a conceptual extension of the scope of existing and new models ...

Surveys concerning environmental and health risks point out the lack of trust of citizens in risk evaluations provided by governments. The aim of this paper is to take into account the impact of this potential distrust on political decisions concerning risk reduction. We prove that lack of trust reduces the attractiveness of risk reduction measures. When heterogeneity in risk exposure and the p...

There are now hundreds of thousands of pathogenicity assertions that relate genetic variation to disease, but most of this clinically utilized variation has no accepted quantitative disease risk estimate. Recent disease-specific studies have used control sequence data to reclassify large amounts of prior pathogenic variation, but there is a critical need to scale up both the pace and feasibilit...

iii ABSTRACT OF THESIS OPTIMISTIC BIAS IN RELATION TO HURRICANE RISK Public officials in the natural disaster field benefit from knowing whether individuals tend to underestimate or overestimate the dangers they could face from future hurricanes. Correcting hurricane risk misperceptions can encourage individuals living in coastal regions to take action and prepare themselves for the next hurric...