Risky Risky Risk

Today in my environmental science class, we learned about risk. In my definition, risk is something that people have to bet on. However, it was not definition that I knew in environmental class. Therefore, I researched about risk as a environmental term. According to my research, risk is "the probability of an unwanted outcome." To give an example, this chart shows the consequences of oil spills and people worries about spilling oil but according to the pie chart there are always "unwanted outcome" which is runoff from land. Not only that, I have founded that the most important risk that people consider is risk of death. I have found out that people are losing their focus of risk of death as a drastic situation by overestimating the problem. However, students should understand that there are risk of death that people underestimates, such as smoking cigarettes and drinking overload of alcohols.

On the other hand, I have found out that ordinary citizens and experts have different thoughts of "risk." Perceptions of risk by both of them have categorized as high risk and low risk. Experts believe that perception of high risk is global climate change and ozone depletion. Not only that, they believe that perception of low risk is oil spills and water pollution. However, ordinary citizen believed that perception of high risk is ozone depletion, oil spills, and etc..  Also, they believed that perception of low risk is global climate change and water pollution. It is very interesting to see that experts and ordinary citizens have opposite thoughts of risk. To conclude, understanding the concept of risk may vary. There are different types of risk and people have to understand the consequence of risk and do not underestimate the risk. Therefore, by writing this blog, I can clearly understand the concept of risk and understand what we have learned in my environmental class.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2988216/
http://ww.w.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her62/62sjoberg.pdf