With this edition of Impact Connector, we’re focusing on risk and impact assessment. Risk assessment and impact assessment are disciplines that have evolved in parallel and have an intriguing and overlapping relationship. Indeed, debate continues about whether they are, in fact, distinctly different or not. We won’t resolve the debate here, and it’s not our intention to do so. We can and will, however, refer you an excellent early treatise by Andrews (1) on the subject and Martina Zelenakova’s paper (2) on the integration of risk assessment with the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process. From these you can explore the relationship between the disciplines. This edition of Impact Connector serves as an introduction to risk assessment and offers new and innovative ways of understanding and responding to risk. It also describes case studies where a variety of methods were applied to understand the riskfrom natural hazards and climate change. We don’t explore public health risk or many other sub-domains of risk assessment and, intentionally, the focus has been on risks presented by natural hazards.