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In 1996, the prominent risk researcher Stan Kaplan received the Distinguished Award from the Society for Risk Analysis. To express his gratitude, Kaplan gave a talk to the plenary session at the society's annual meeting. In the introduction to this talk, he said:

The words of risk analysis have been, and continue to be a problem. Many of you remember that when our Society for Risk Analysis was brand new, one of the first things it did was to establish a committee to define the word “risk.” This committee labored for 4 years and then gave up, saying in its final report, that maybe it's better not to define risk. Let each author define it in his own way, only please each should explain clearly what way that is (Kaplan 1997 , p. 407).

This quotation neatly summarizes one of the problems with this discipline; there are no common definitions of many of the words that we are using. One reason may be that risk is a concept that many disciplines are concerned about, bringing different starting points, perspectives, and terminologies into the discussion. In addition, risk is a term that is commonly used in everyday language, often without a precise meaning attached to it. This chapter attempts to define the key concepts and words from the point of view of the main objectives of this book, which is risk assessment of technical and sociotechnical systems. This means that other users of risk analysis and risk assessment may choose other definitions, and we briefly mention some of these in this section. We have tried to develop a coherent and useful set of definitions that fits our purpose.

A word of caution when reading about this topic is, therefore, to make sure that you understand what the authors mean, when they use words such as risk, hazard, and accident. Unfortunately, not all authors writing about risk have heeded the advice of Stan Kaplan, explaining clearly how they define the terms. The meaning may therefore be unclear and different from how we define the terms in this book.

When discussing risk and other terms in this chapter, we sometimes use terms before they are properly defined. If this causes confusion or things are unclear, please be patient and read on and things will hopefully become more clear as you progress through the chapter.