Course description
Environmental risk presents large threat to environmental health and public health. Therefore, environmental engineers have to learn how to identify and address the risk. In this course, students will be taught theories and knowledge about risk analysis and emergency response in Module 1 to 5. They will be asked to use these theories and knowledge to analyze 6 cases in Module 6, to conduct role-playing work and debate with each other. In Module 1, the basic concepts about environmental risk will be taught. Then, module 2 shows the procedure and tools for risk analysis which can be used to quantify the environment risk in certain area. Solving or attenuating the risk needs some emergency treatment technologies, as presented in Module 3. These technologies have been applied in some real emergency response cases and performed well. Management is another important part for emergency response and routine work for environment protection agencies to avoid or attenuate the contaminant spill accidents. Module 5 presents the efforts with finance, insurance and policy to depress the risk, to prevent the accidents and to punish peace-breaker once accident occurs. With the aforementioned theory and knowledge, the students will be assigned into groups. Each group choose one role in certain case. They need to collect information about this case, be familiar with their role and debate with each other in the course to find out who is to blame during the accident. They are also encouraged to work together to find out the solution to avoid the next accident in the future.

Contents
1. What is Environmental Risk? (1 week)
Risk, Crisis
Environmental Risk
Public Disaster
Emergency Response
2. Risk Analysis (1 week)
How to identify risk
How to quantify risk
3. Emergency Response Technologies (1 week)
Adsorption
Chemical Sedimentation
Oxidation or Reduction
Air stripping
Etc.
4. Emergency Response Management (2 weeks)
Prepared plan for emergency response
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)
Emergency response in USA: Superfund & etc.
Emergency Management about Water: Water Safety Plan
5.Emergency Related Finance, Insurance and Policy (2 weeks)
Finance
Insurance
Policy
6. Case studies (6 weeks):
Basel Chemical Spill in 1984, Switzerland
Heavy Metal Spill in Danube in 2004, Europe
Taihu Lake Episode in 2007, China
Fukushima Nuclear Power Station Accident in 2011, Japan
Cadmium Spill in 2012, China
Odorant Spill in 2014, West Virginia, USA

Note: Each case will be introduced briefly by the teacher. Then, students are assigned into groups. They are required to play a role in one case and try to debate with each other about who to blame and how to avoid/solve this problem.

Evaluation
_Attendance
_Interactive activities and discussion in course
_Write a report on water-related topics, about 5000 words