Risk Assessment and Mitigation Flashcards

A project risk assessment identifies that a proposed solar farm may displace agricultural land critical to local food security. This is best categorized as a:

Answer: Social and community risk

Displacement of food-producing land affects community food security, quality of life, and equity, making it a social and community risk.

Which approach allows infrastructure planners to test how a system performs under a range of future scenarios without committing to a single projected outcome?

Answer: Scenario planning and stress testing

Scenario planning tests infrastructure performance across multiple plausible futures, enabling robust decisions that perform acceptably even if the exact future is uncertain.

When a project team purchases carbon credits to offset residual greenhouse gas emissions they cannot eliminate, they are employing which risk response strategy?

Answer: Risk transfer / offset

Carbon offset purchasing transfers the climate impact burden to a third-party mitigation project, which is analogous to a risk transfer or offset strategy.

A risk assessment for a new transit corridor identifies that construction activities near a historically significant neighborhood could cause cultural displacement. The Envision framework addresses this under which goal area?

Answer: Wellbeing

Envision's Wellbeing goal area includes credits for community quality of life, cultural preservation, and equitable access, making it the relevant framework for cultural displacement risk.

Which regulatory program in the US requires federal agencies to assess the environmental risks of proposed major actions and publicly disclose significant adverse effects?

Answer: National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)

NEPA mandates Environmental Impact Assessments for major federal actions, requiring agencies to identify, disclose, and mitigate significant environmental risks.

A project in a seismically active zone incorporates base isolation systems into a critical water pumping station. This is an example of which risk management strategy?

Answer: Consequence reduction through engineered resilience

Base isolation reduces structural damage during an earthquake, lowering the consequence severity while the seismic hazard itself remains unchanged.

In adaptive management for long-lived infrastructure, 'trigger thresholds' are best defined as:

Answer: Pre-defined conditions that signal it is time to implement the next planned adaptation action

Trigger thresholds are observable indicators—such as temperature rise or sea-level measurements—that, when reached, activate pre-planned adaptation measures in a structured adaptive management framework.