A Pathway to Linking Risk and Sustainability Assessments

Toxics

Stephen H. Linder¹  Ken Sexton²  Marta Schuhmacher³ 

[1] Institute for Health Policy, Division of Management, Policy and Community Health, The University of Texas School of Public Health, 1200 Pressler, E-1023, Houston, TX 77030, USA;Division of Epidemiology, Human Genetics and Environmental Sciences, The University of Texas School of Public Health, Brownsville Regional Campus, Fort Brown Road, RAHC, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA; E-Mail:;id="af1-toxics-02-00533">1Institute for Health Policy, Division of Management, Policy and Community Health, The University of Texas School of Public Health, 1200 Pressler, E-1023, Houston, TX 77030, U

关键词: cumulative risk assessment;    sustainability assessment;    regulatory decision-making;    multi-criteria decision analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3390/toxics2040533

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The US National Research Council recently released a report promoting sustainability assessment as the future of environmental regulation. Thirty years earlier, this organization (under the same senior author) had issued a similar report promoting risk assessment as a new method for improving the science behind regulatory decisions. Tools for risk assessment were subsequently developed and adopted in state and federal agencies throughout the US. Since then, limitations of the traditional forms of risk assessment have prompted some dramatic modifications toward cumulative assessments that combine multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors in community settings. At present, however, there is little momentum within the risk assessment community for abandoning this evolved system in favor of a new sustainability-based one. The key question is, how best to proceed? Should sustainability principles be incorporated into current risk assessment procedures, or vice versa? Widespread recognition of the importance of sustainability offers no clear guidance for the risk assessment community, especially in light of institutional commitments to sustainability tools and definitions that appear to have little in common with cumulative risk notions. The purpose of this paper is to reframe the sustainability challenge for risk assessors by offering analytical guidance to chart a way out. We adopt a decision analysis framework to overcome some conceptual barriers separating these two forms of assessment, and thereby, both escape the either/or choice and accept the inevitability of sustainability as a central regulatory concern in the U.S.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.