Environmental Risk and Reliability for Sustainable Dredging

This paper will discuss how dredging work leads to changes to the environment. The paper shows how environmental impact assessments (EIA) have been employed to address these changes. Risk assessment that rarely covers a large part of uncertainty is associated with dredging work and is captured in the EIA. The EIA focuses on fixed and inflexible standards that have led to post dredging failures and this makes it necessary to do critical and dependability scientific risk analysis that quantitatively determines whether the changes are serious or irreversible. This paper also discusses the new internationally recognized philosophy of risk analysis or formal and system risk based design that provides opportunity to focus on real concerns of the dredging project. The paper will also discuss a case study of a failed project based on conventional EIA and best practice performance of systemic risk base design approach.