The Commission's Risk
Management Framework

What Is Risk Management?

During the last 25 years, our nation has made tremendous progress in improving the quality of our environment and our workplaces, as well as the safety of pharmaceutical drugs, food, and other consumer products. Much of this progress has relied, explicitly or implicitly, on a process called risk management.

Risk management is the process of identifying, evaluating, selecting, and implementing actions to reduce risk to human health and to ecosystems. The goal of risk management is scientifically sound, cost-effective, integrated actions that reduce or prevent risks while taking into account social, cultural, ethical, political, and legal considerations.

Our definition of risk management is broader than the traditional definition, which is restricted to the process of evaluating alternative regulatory actions and selecting among them. In recent years, the scope and tools of risk management have broadened considerably beyond regulatory actions taken by federal, state, and local government agencies, for two reasons:

(See also, "What Is 'Risk'?")

During the traditional risk management process, decision-makers (typically government officials and other risk managers) gather information about a situation that poses or may pose a risk to human health and to ecological health. Air pollution, water pollution, workplace exposures, and the introduction of new pharmaceutical or consumer products are examples of situations that could pose risks to health or the environment. Risk managers use this information they have gathered to consider the:

• Nature and magnitude of risks.

• Need for reducing or eliminating the risks.

• Effectiveness and costs of options for reducing the risks.

In some cases, risk managers also consider the economic, social, cultural, ethical, legal, and political implications associated with implementing each option, as well as any worker health, community health, or ecological hazards the options may cause. In other cases, laws or procedures hinder risk managers from considering those implications and impacts.

Risks to human health can come from many
sources; industrial facilities, combustion
engines, and different media - air, water or soil.

 

The Need for a More Comprehensive Approach to Risk Management:
The Commission’s Risk Management Framework

In the environmental arena, statutes and legal precedents tend to dictate risk management approaches that focus on one type of risk (e.g., cancers or birth defects in humans) posed by a single chemical in a single medium (air, water, or land). Conclusions about risk are based almost exclusively on observations of toxicity from high doses of the chemical in laboratory animals or in the workplace. While these approaches have contributed to tremendous progress in reducing health, safety, and environmental risks in recent decades, they are not adequate for addressing the more complex risk problems we now face.

Creative, integrated strategies that address multiple environmental media and multiple sources of risk are needed if we are to sustain and strengthen the environmental improvements and risk reduction our nation has attained over the last 25 years. To help meet these needs, the Commission has developed a systematic, comprehensive Risk Management Framework, illustrated and summarized. (See "Framework for Risk Management"; see also, "Principles for Risk Management Decision-Making".)

The Framework is general enough to work in a wide variety of situations. The level of effort and resources invested in using the Framework can be scaled to the importance of the problem, potential severity and economic impact of the risk, level of controversy surrounding it, and resource constraints. The Framework is primarily intended for risk decisions related to setting standards, controlling pollution, protecting health, and cleaning up the environment. It is useful for addressing these types of decisions at a local community level (e.g., siting an incinerator or cleaning up a hazardous waste site) or a national level (e.g., developing a national program for controlling motor vehicle emissions). The Framework need not be invoked for risk situations that are routinely and expeditiously managed—for example, by hazardous materials response teams, emergency room physicians, firefighter rescue teams, and voluntary product recalls. (See also, "Advantages of the Commission's Risk Management Framework.")

Every stage of the Framework relies on three key principles:

Broader contexts. Instead of evaluating single risks associated with single chemicals in single environmental media, the Framework puts health and environmental problems in their larger, real-world contexts. Evaluating problems in context involves evaluating different sources of a particular chemical or chemical exposure, considering other chemicals that could affect a particular risk or pose additional risks, assessing other similar risks, and evaluating the extent to which different exposures contribute to a particular health effect of concern. The goal of considering problems in their context is to clarify the impact that individual risk management actions are likely to have on public health or the environment and to help direct actions and resources where they will do the most good.

Stakeholder participation. Involvement of stakeholders—parties who are concerned about or affected by the risk management problem—is critical to making and successfully implementing sound, cost-effective, informed risk management decisions. For this reason, the Framework encourages stakeholder involvement to the extent appropriate and feasible during all stages of the risk management process. "Establish a Process for Engaging Stakeholders" on page 15 discusses in depth the value of and approaches to involving stakeholders.

Iteration. Valuable information or perspective may emerge during any stage of the risk management process. This Framework is designed so that parts of it may be repeated, giving risk managers and stakeholders the flexibility to revisit early stages of the process when new findings made during later stages shed sufficiently important light on earlier deliberations and decisions. ("The Importance of Iteration" on page 47 provides more information.)

 

Every stage of the framework relies on defining risks in a broader context, involving stakeholders, and repeating the process, or part of it, when needed.