Some Examples of Risk Analysis in Environmental Problems- Keynote Talk ∗

Risk analysis, that is the problem of estimating the probabilities of rare and damaging events, unifies the geosciences. One can mention the risks from: floods, earthquakes, forest fires, space debris. The probabilities may be fed into the computaion of insurance premiums. The Poisson process often plays a prominent role, while marked point processes have a basic function. Various ways to collect and extrapolate data will be described and examples from various fields will be presented. The topic unifies the environmental sciences. 1 Introduction. 1.1 Risk. Risk may be defined as the probability of some hazardous event or catastrophe, the chance something bad will happen. In many cases huge amounts of money are involved [24]. The principal concern is low probability- high consequenc