Understanding Risks in an Evolving World – Emerging Best Practices in Natural Disaster Risk Assessment

This publication highlights some of the influential efforts—by technical specialists, institutions, and governments around the world—to create and communicate risk information faster and at lower cost, to improve the quality and transparency of risk information, and to enable more local engagement in the production of authoritative risk information than ever before.

This publication is not a “how-to” guide for risk assessment, nor does it provide a technical articulation of the risk assessment process. Rather, it provides insight into the potential richness and range of risk assessment approaches and their capacity to meet a variety of purposes and contexts within the same overarching framework. For scientists, engineers, and others producing risk information, the publication highlights some of the challenges in understanding risk—beyond the strictly technical aspects that are described in many other publications.