Technogenic Risk: Issues of Methodology

Abstract

The concepts of risk and the so-called risk-based approach are currently very popular in a wide variety of areas of public life. The success of this relatively new approach is largely determined by the quality of its methodological and technical elaboration. Meanwhile, a thorough analysis of the current domestic regulatory framework has shown that the most important issues of the methodology of this approach are far from a satisfactory solution, which causes excessive uncertainty in the quantitative estimates obtained with its help. This uncertainty, the presence of which is usually not recognized, in its predominant part has a subjective origin. It is the possibility of obtaining a quantitative measure of dangers of various kinds, allowing their comparison and ranking, that makes this approach so attractive and promising. The article analyzes the current domestic methodological basis for the analysis and quantitative assessment of the technogenic risk of its two types and six varieties. The available alternative options for assessing the possibility of adverse events and the main unresolved problems of assessing their scale were considered. T he article consists of three parts, united by a methodological analysis of the current domestic regulatory framework of the concept of technogenic risk, its types and varieties: a) in its first part, methodological approaches to the interpretation of six varieties of technogenic risk are analyzed in detail, the problems of each of them are noted; b) the second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of methods for assessing such a component of technogenic risk as the possibility of an undesirable event (damage); c) the third part of the article analyzes the problems of assessing its other component — the amount of damage.