The Fourth Engineering Foundation Conference on Risk-Based Decisionmaking will take place in Santa Barbara, California on October 15-20, 1989. The major goal of this series of conferences is to integrate what is known about technological risk assessment with social risk acceptance within a common set of multiobjective water resources planning problems, among them, coping with floods and droughts. Another goal is to determine what the topics are which need further investigation. The main themes to be addressed during this conference are: 1) the difference between risk analysis conducted as part of planning and that of engineering reliability analysis during design; 2) the issues facing the engineering profession related to risk analysis and legal liability, the use of engineering design standards, and the overall usefulness of risk analysis to decisionmaking; and 3) the usefulness of case studies and practical examples of risk analysis application to water resources engineering problems.
