The following information appears in a box on page 31 of the printed report.
Risk Management Methods
The number of options for reducing risks to human health and the environment has increased in recent years, providing risk managers with greater flexibility and a wide suite of risk management tools. Historically, risk reduction was most commonly achieved by command-and-control regulations that dictated how to control pollution at the "end of the pipe" rather than reducing or preventing it in the first place. Regulatory requirements were then enforced through a system of permits, penalties, and legal actions. This approach significantly reduced pollution, but may have reached a point of diminishing returns—in other words, further improvement via this approach will likely be very expensive for the additional benefit gained.
For this reason, regulatory agencies have been exploring and implementing a number of regulatory and nonregulatory alternatives in recent years, including education, incentives, monitoring, surveillance, and research:
Education/Information. Educational tools include right-to-know requirements such as EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory and California’s Proposition 65. These laws require industry to publicly and periodically disclose information about pollution and potentially hazardous products. Right-to-know laws are based on the idea that public concern about pollution will encourage industry to voluntarily reduce the use and release of pollutants and hazardous products.
Incentives. Voluntary risk reduction can be encouraged through a number of mechanisms, including market-based incentives, subsidies, alternative compliance, and consensus, mediation, and dialogue projects. One example of market-based incentives is the use of tradable pollutant allowances in combination with a cap on the amount of pollution released—such as sulfur dioxide in EPA’s acid rain program. Alternative compliance projects include EPA’s Project XL, which is experimenting with ways to give companies greater flexibility in how they reduce emissions or their related risks to or below target levels.
Monitoring. Monitoring can be a useful risk management tool, especially when a community is skeptical about how effective a risk management option will be. Communities may be more willing to accept an alternative to a traditional command-and-control program when monitoring data provide concrete evidence about its effectiveness.
Surveillance. Health surveillance is a valuable technique for observing the effects of pollution and the expected positive impact of pollution reduction measures, especially in the workplace.
Research. The Risk Management Framework will generate questions and identify gaps in knowledge that must be addressed through research. Research agendas are an important output of risk management processes and are sometimes required by statute, such as the periodic reassessment of evidence underlying national ambient air quality standards required by the Clean Air Act. EPA’s cooperative effort with scientists in universities, industries, and environmental groups to identify and design appropriate research projects on hormonally active contaminants is another example of research to inform risk management decision-making.