This interdisciplinary research project aims to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of acceptable and tolerable risks posed by natural hazards. Examples of natural hazards include tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Currently available approaches to risk analysis do not adequately capture the impact of natural hazards on the well-being of individuals. They also fail to consider the moral implications of the influence of the built and modified natural environments on both the probability of occurrence and the severity of the societal impact of natural hazards.
The PIs define risk as the probability that individuals' capabilities will be reduced due to a hazard. Capabilities refer to the states and activities that are valuable, such as being adequately nourished or sheltered, that an individual has a genuine opportunity to achieve. Drawing on probability, reliability, and statistical methods, the PIs will develop a formulation to predict the impact of hazards on capabilities, based on available data from past disasters. The PIs will specify thresholds of acceptable and tolerable levels of capabilities using the general principles employed in law to specify broad legal rights, such as the right to free speech. These thresholds will serve as empirically verified standards, against which the predicted level of individuals? capabilities should be compared. Finally, standards for permissible and impermissible increases in the probability of occurrence and the severity of the impact of hazards on capabilities due to the characteristics of the built and modified natural environments will be identified.
The proposed taxonomy provides an original and potentially transformative theoretical framework, which brings ethics to the center of risk analysis and conceptualizes in a novel manner the impact and moral significance of hazards. The proposed taxonomy can be used to formulate informed and sustainable public policies regarding resource allocation in the context of natural hazard mitigation.
