The Mediterranean region is undergoing rapid local and global social and environmental changes. All indicators point to an increase in environmental and water scarcity problems with negative implications towards current and future sustainability. Water management in Mediterranean countries is...

Natural or induced floods are of increasing concern to watermanagers and civil protection services for three main reasons.Firstly, a continuous and 'unconscious' increase of socialpressure in the flooding valleys amplifies flood vulnerabilitiesand consequently natural or induced flood risk....

The water quality of rivers in Japan has received greater attention in recent years due to a number of factors, including human-induced land subsidence and an increase in water demand. Surface waters are adversely affected by high frequency, low level risks (such as the continuous release of...

Simultaneous consideration of initial construction cost and failure risk in practical design of critical hydraulic structures is a long-standing problem in water resources planning and management. Despite extensive efforts to effectively tackle this problem during recent decades, the traditional...

The normal accidents and high reliability organisations theories are widely known as presenting the intellectual discourse between two opposing schools of thought for risk management of complex systems as the first is tagged as pessimistic while the latter is labelled as optimistic. Due to high...

Climate changes require special attention and global monitoring. Impacts on nature and industry are increasingly evident. Water transport could be the backbone of the future European combined transport system. Unfortunately, risks in water transport are perhaps an under researched area and...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to analyse the implementation of risk management as a tool for internal audit activities, focusing on unexpected effects or uncertainties generated during its application. Design/methodology/approach –Public and confidential documents as well as...

Purpose – What copulas are, their estimation, and use is illustrated using a geographical diversification example. To accomplish this, dependencies between county-level yields are calculated for non-irrigated wheat, upland cotton, and sorghum using Pearson linear correlation and Kendall's tau....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of the so-called “small-sample problem” within quantitative exchange-rate risk management. Design/methodology/approach –The authors take a closer look at the frequency distribution of nominal price changes in the European...