Informing and educating the public about risk

42 pagesThe objective of informing and educating the public about risk issues seems easy to attain in principle, but, in practice, may be difficult to accomplish. This paper attempts to illustrate why this is so. To be effective, risk communicators must recognize and overcome a number of obstacles that have their roots in the limitations of scientific risk assessment and the idiosyncrasies of the human mind. Doing an adequate job of communicating means finding comprehensible ways of presenting complex technical material that is clouded by uncertainty and inherently difficult to understand. The problems may not be insurmountable, however, if designers of risk information programs are sensitive to the difficulties

Monitoring the effect of urban green areas on the heat island in Athens

The role of urban green areas in the microclimatic conditions of cities, during summer, is investigated in this paper through monitoring campaigns carried out at the National garden, at the city centre of Athens. Two types of investigations were carried out: i) a microscopic one that investigated the thermal conditions inside the Garden and the immediate surrounding urban area and ii) a macroscopic one that compared the temperature profile of the Garden with that of the greater city centre area. It was concluded that in microscopic level, the temperature profile inside the National Garden and the immediate surrounding urban area did not showed a clear evidence of the influence of the Garden and it was dependent on the characteristics of each location. In a macroscopic scale, the Garden was found cooler than the other monitored urban locations and temperature differences were mainly greater during the night, especially in streets with high building height to street width (H/W) ratio and low traffic, while in streets with high anthropogenic heat during the day, the biggest temperature differences were recorded during the day