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Abstract
Over the past few decades, there has been an increasing concern that human actions and natural catastrophes have been adversely impacting the environment, and posing serious ecological and health hazards. This concern has led to an increased emphasis on environmental risk assessment studies all over the world.

Environmental risk assessment aims at studying the nature of environmental hazards, (emission of a pollutant/contaminant, natural hazard events, use of a hazardous technology, or any possible combination of these), and estimating the associated probability of occurrence of such events. The study also aims at characterizing the adverse effects of environmental hazards resulting from human and ecological exposures.

Environmental risk management seeks to minimize the impact of natural catastrophes, based on a detailed analysis of the risk assessment results. This helps in effective planning of the remedial steps, prioritizing of the action items, and early decision-making. This also helps in the quick enforcement of suitable policy or regulatory mechanisms. Today, environmental risk management is practiced by a wide range of industry segments, such as general and life insurance, real estate and construction, government and development funding organizations, agriculture, and utilities sectors.

In the past, GIS based software applications have been used widely for environmental risk assessment and analysis studies. The usage of GIS in environmental risk management ranges from development of databases/inventory systems, and simple to advanced GIS layers overlay, to complex spatial decision-making systems for study of the impact of air, water and soil pollution, ecological imbalance, and natural disasters on the environmental and human receptors.

Environmental risk management also uses inputs and expertise from many other disciplines. Chemistry, physics, biology, ecology, geology, hydrology, engineering and statistics being some of them. Typically, a large number of complex variables are involved in the risk assessment and analysis process.

The environmental risk management process involves usage of information derived and presented in various ways. For example, comparative (or relative) risk analysis, cost-benefit analysis, scenario analysis, probabilistic analysis, decision matrix, sensitivity analysis etc. Due to the need for displaying and analyzing a huge volume of the spatial as well as non-spatial environmental hazards, and exposure data, in a fast and accurate manner, GIS based software applications serve as powerful tools for effective environmental risk assessment and management.

This paper discusses an approach for the use of GIS-based software application framework for environmental risk management. The paper shall also present three case studies on the use of this approach for resolving some specific environmental risk management problems.