Risk perception

Abstract

Human groups, throughout their history, have always been exposed to different types of risk, i.e., to potentially unfavorable circumstances. These risk situations have infl uenced the relationships of people with the environment and have been instrumental for the development of strategies for the exploitation of natural resources, as well as in other aspects of human survival. Practices and beliefs related to health care, for example, reveal key points in terms of how people perceive the environmental risks to which they are susceptible. In this chapter, we conceptualize risk perception and discuss how this can be important from a theoretical and practical point of view in ethnobiological studies.