By Amy Charlene
Reed, RiskWorld staff
E-mail to: reed@tec-com.com
A major report recently released by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council
sweepingly redefines risk
characterization with the ultimate goal of increasing
stakeholders' acceptance of risk assessments. (Editor's note: The
full
text of the report is on line at the National Academy Press'
World Wide Web site.)
Prepared by the council's Committee on Risk Characterization, the report Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society urges risk assessors to expand risk characterization beyond the current practice of merely translating the results of a risk analysis into nontechnical terms. This limited approach is "seriously deficient" and should be replaced with an analytical-deliberative approach that involves stakeholders from the very inception of a risk assessment, the report advocates.
"The report reframes risk characterization from an activity that happens at the end of the risk assessment process, as many people understand it, to a continuous, back-and-forth dialogue between risk assessors and stakeholders that allows the problem to be formulated properly," said veteran risk assessor and committee member D. Warner North of Decision Focus Inc. in Mountain View, California.
The report, in effect, puts risk characterization in the driver's seat. “. . .(W)hat is needed for successful characterization of risk must be considered at the very beginning of the process and must to a great extent drive risk analysis,” the report states.
Broad support
Federal agencies and other organizations that supported the
committee's efforts and are expected to consider the report's
recommendations include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(U.S. EPA), the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, the American Industrial Health Council, the Chemical
Manufacturers Association, and the Electric Power Research
Institute.
The study was undertaken out of concern that "the way the nation handles risk often breaks down at the stage of risk characterization." Past experience had shown that, on the one hand, oversimplifying the science could lead to the inappropriate use of scientific information in decision making, while, on the other hand, the opposite approach of providing full information could undermine the audience's trust in risk assessments if the analyses did not address the audience's key concerns.
To help risk characterization overcome these failings, the committee devised a new framework that relies heavily on the participation of stakeholders, whom it calls the "interested and affected parties."
"We purposely used the term 'interested and affected parties' because we weren't only talking about the public at large but also about select groups with special knowledge, concerns, or needs that could be important to the risk assessment process," said social sciences researcher Caron Chess, who is the director of Rutgers University's Center for Environmental Communication in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "'Interested and affected parties' could be any group from university scientists involved in the issue to a small business trade group to a geographically based constituency. It depends on the situation and varies with each risk characterization."
Recent controversies unresolved
The report notes that many recent controversial risk decisions failed to win stakeholder approval because the analyses ignored key risks important to the stakeholders. Examples cited in the report include the U.S. EPA's $6-million scientific reassessment of the health risks of dioxin and recent analyses on the proposed use of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as a national repository for high-level radioactive waste.
In cases such as these, "the underlying analysis failed to pay adequate attention to questions of central concern to some of the interested and affected parties," the report states. "Experience shows that analyses, no matter how thorough, that do not address the decision-relevant questions, use reasonable assumptions, and meaningfully include the key affected parties can result in huge expenses and long delays and jeopardize the quality of understanding and the acceptability of the final decisions."
U.S. EPA's dioxin reassessment, for example, targeted only one aspect -- dioxin-induced cancer -- and failed to address stakeholders' other concerns such as non-cancer health effects, the fairness of exposing a community that may already have an abundance of toxic chemical sites to yet another toxic site, the possibility that the local population has characteristics that make it unusually susceptible to damage from an additional body burden of dioxin, and the effects of the contemplated action on local property values. "A risk characterization focused solely on scientific questions about the dose-response relationship of dioxin to cancer may be highly unsatisfactory to some people because it is only marginally relevant to their most serious concerns," noted the report.
Involving stakeholders early in the process before the risk assessment is undertaken can help avoid such pitfalls, Chess said. "It gives an agency's risk analysts a better sense of what the parameters of a risk characterization should include, and it expands their access to information and expertise that aren't available inside the agency -- from a university professor's technical knowledge to a community's historical knowledge of a situation."
Flexible guidelines set
The report offers seven principles for implementing the risk characterization process.
While these principles stress the importance of stakeholder involvement, committee members emphasized that the degree of stakeholder involvement is flexible and should vary according to the situation's demands.
"We're not saying that every risk characterization should include a massive deliberative effort. Each situation will be different," Chess said. "But it is important that each attempt at risk characterization includes a careful diagnosis that looks at what the deliberative process should be and how that process should be integrated with the analytic process."
To help risk assessors determine the necessary level of stakeholder participation for a given situation, one of the report's principles offers an eight-step diagnostic process and notes that the initial diagnosis should be open to change as further information is gathered from both scientific analysis and deliberation.
Successes already occurring
The committee cites case studies that illustrate how aspects of the report's recommended analytical-deliberative approach have been successfully used in the past. These include Florida's planning for the long-term ecological health of the Everglades and the negotiation of a regulation for disinfectant by products in drinking water.
"What we're proposing is not revolutionary," Chess said. "When I go in the field and talk with people, it is clear to me that every single agency has some form of an analytic-deliberative process under way. The reason these processes aren't better known is because they are rarely documented.
"We only hear about it when something goes wrong -- when there's a public explosion. The successes tend to be quiet, unsung, and undocumented."
The report, which was edited by committee Chair Harvey V. Fineberg, dean of Harvard University's School of Public Health, and by National Research Council staff member Paul C. Stern, is available in hard copy from the National Academy Press for $39.95 plus shipping charges of $4 for single copies and 50 cents for additional copies. Call (202) 334-3313 or (800) 624-6242 to order.
To order the report electronically, visit the National Academy Press or go directly to its specific order form for this report.
Links to Related Information
Full
text of the report Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions
in a Democratic Society
Listing
of Committee Members
Task
Statement
Report's
Seven Principles for Implementing the Process
Selected
Definitions from the Report's Glossary
Press Release
http://www2.nas.edu/whatsnew/247e.html
National Academy of Sciences' World
Wide Web Site http://www.nas.edu
National Research Council's
World Wide Web Site http://www.nas.edu/nrc/
National
Academy Press' World Wide Web Site
http://www.nap.edu/nap/bookstore/welcome.html
Story posted July 20, 1996
Story last updated September 27, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Tec-Com Inc.