Implementing the Framework

 

Recommendations to Congress and Executive Branch Agencies

Most environmental problems affect more than one environmental medium and involve exposures to mixtures of chemicals. The Commission’s Risk Management Framework is designed to address these complex, real-world issues. Yet, environmental agencies may encounter legal and administrative hurdles when implementing the Framework because most environmental statutes, agency programs, and Congressional committees and subcommittees focus on managing individual pollutants in single environmental media. Current procedures also limit stakeholder involvement in decision-making and the ability of agencies to consider the larger context when addressing health and environmental problems. In short, the programs, regulations, and procedures developed under current statutes often preclude an integrated approach. The Commission makes six recommendations, described below, to overcome these impediments.

 


 

Recommendation 1: Congress should coordinate the activities of committees and subcommittees with overlapping or related jurisdictional responsibilities for environmental issues, starting with joint oversight hearings.

Many different Congressional committees and subcommittees have overlapping and conflicting responsibilities for sources of and solutions to pollution. For example, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives both oversee EPA’s implementation of Superfund and the Safe Drinking Water Act. In the Senate, the Agriculture Committee has jurisdiction over pesticides, while the Environment and Public Works Committee oversees other toxic substances. These competing responsibilities make it difficult to implement integrated strategies. We recognize the practical and political constraints that make coordination difficult.

Joint Congressional hearings could:

For example, the Agriculture Committee and the Resources Committee in the House could stimulate coordinated approaches to integrating chemical and microbial risk assessment and benefit-cost practices throughout the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They could also promote the use of the Commission’s Risk Management Framework by the Natural Resources Conservation Service in addressing erosion and water pollution from agricultural lands. Other committees should look at industrial sectors, such as iron and steel mills or oil refineries, to address sector-specific pollution and manufacturing processes on a multimedia basis.

Some committees address the environmental status of geographic areas, such as the House Resources Committee’s jurisdiction over parks, wild and scenic rivers, and national forests, but no committee is charged with responsibility for the status of urban pollution or of watersheds. In the House, joint hearings involving the Resources Committee, the Agriculture Committee, and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Clean Water Act, could better address the myriad stresses on a watershed. Similarly, the House Commerce Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee could hold joint hearings to encourage the use of the Commission’s Risk Management Framework to comprehensively deal with Superfund sites.

Recommendation 2: The regulatory agencies should fully use their existing discretionary authority to propose and implement actions that address the most significant sources of total exposure to hazards under review.

Many agencies have improved their risk assessment practices, used risk assessment in more programs, and begun to engage stakeholders in decision-making processes. In many cases, adoption of the Commission’s Risk Management Framework by federal, state, and local agencies will not require changes in statutes so much as changes in the decision-making process to identify all the sources that account for total exposure and estimate the risks attributable to each source.

California’s air toxics program provides a good model of an integrated regulatory strategy that is being achieved administratively. Rather than first assessing risks from individual sources, that program estimates the overall risk attributable to a particular chemical. Upon deciding that the risk is sufficiently high to warrant action, the program examines all identified stationary, mobile, and area sources of the chemicals to determine the most cost-effective reductions in emissions and exposure. The EPA has launched a similar cumulative exposure approach for hazardous air pollutants (see below).

"As a Commissioner, I saw far too many cases where extreme attention was placed at an industrial facility on ensuring that every last molecule of a toxic substance was kept out of the air, only to have that same substance ignored as it poured through the floor drain into the groundwater . . . . Taking a look at whole facilities, at the whole mix of pollutants, at whole watersheds, is fundamental."

—Daniel Greenbaum,
President of the Health Effects Institute
Former Commissioner for
Environmental Protection, State of Massachusetts

Recommendation 3: The regulatory agencies should fully use their existing discretionary authority to expand stakeholder involvement in the development and implementation of solutions to environmental problems.

Successful integrated approaches depend on trust among agencies and stakeholders. Public notice and comment procedures are inadequate for building the level of trust and cooperation necessary for integrated approaches. Stakeholder involvement processes such as those used in the Common Sense Initiative and Project XL are a good beginning. As the participants have learned, however, unexpected difficulties—such as disagreements about the composition of stakeholder groups and problems arriving at consensus—have slowed the completion of projects. We believe that implementation of our "Guidelines for Stakeholder Involvement" (see page 16) can increase prospects for productive stakeholder involvement. Agency adoption of the Commission’s Framework for Risk Management can provide a consistent approach to risk management decision-making.

Recommendation 4: Congress should reinforce implementation of the Commission’s Risk Management Framework legislatively, statute-by-statute.

For several years, Congress has considered bills that would prescribe government-wide risk assessment and economic analysis practices and make them judicially enforceable. Also, an "organic act" has been proposed that would integrate the operations of EPA’s program offices. However, the 104th Congress found, common ground for bipartisan action by reauthorizing specific statutes instead. For example, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Food Quality Protection Act were modified in ways that provide flexible direction to consider risks, costs, benefits, population subgroups, and public values in decision-making. The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act includes important provisions on the roles of risk assessment and economic analysis in setting standards and priorities for regulation without dictating the specific steps in the analysis or requiring one to outweigh another. It is a good example of how statutes can be modified to promote more flexible risk management strategies. Congress should consider legislative changes that:

Recommendation 5: The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) should consider issuing guidance or regulations for implementing additional provisions of the existing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The National Environmental Policy Act offers some opportunities for implementing the Framework. Instead of aiming to protect specific places, activities, or environmental media, as do most environmental statutes, NEPA seeks to balance a broad range of environmental factors with "other essential considerations of national policy." The act states that its policies and goals are supplementary to those in agencies’ existing statutory authorizations. NEPA regulations, which were issued in 1978, focused on procedural provisions to ensure that decisions about federal actions are made only after the environmental consequences of the actions are fully considered and that the public benefits of the actions outweigh their environmental costs. These regulations are generally consistent with the focus of the Framework.

In addition to procedural requirements, NEPA established six objectives for all federal programs: responsibility for the future; environmental equity; beneficial use; historical, cultural, and biological diversity and individual liberty; widespread prosperity; and management for quality and conservation. The act requires all federal agencies to use a "systematic, interdisciplinary approach" to planning and decision-making that incorporates the "natural and social sciences and the environmental design arts." An analysis by the Environmental Law Institute concluded that these provisions have not been implemented. Agencies could use these objectives to approach problems in the integrated, contextual manner envisioned in the Commission’s Risk Management Framework. CEQ should work with other executive offices and the relevant federal agencies to craft guidance for implementing these NEPA provisions.

Recommendation 6: State and local regulatory and public health agencies should use the Risk Management Framework, as many already do to some extent, to address watershed, airshed, community, worksite, and indoor and outdoor environmental problems using an integrated, multimedia process with stakeholders.

We have given several examples of state and local actions that have been taken to address problems in a broad context with stakeholder involvement, such as California’s toxics air program and efforts in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey to integrate regulatory actions. As in other areas of government endeavor, states and localites engaged in successful integrated risk management projects can serve as catalysts for federal initiatives. However, state and local agencies often rely on federal models of regulation. As a result, they, too, focus primarily on single pollutants in single environmental media and on command-and-control approaches to regulation. State and local agencies should increase their ability both administratively and legislatively to implement the Commission’s Risk Management Framework.

Looking Ahead

The Commission’s Risk Management Framework is not a panacea. It can require substantial time to implement and, in some cases, it might lengthen, not shorten, the risk management process. The ability to implement the Framework will undoubtedly improve over time as more experience is gained with its various aspects and as more relevant information becomes available. For example, more experience with and guidance for including stakeholders is needed. Both agencies and stakeholders need training to better understand and discuss health and environmental risk issues. Agencies and academic institutions must cooperate to generate more and better exposure and toxicity data and methods for assessing multiple and cumulative risks.

As illustrated in this report, some aspects of the Framework—such as stakeholder involvement and multimedia analysis—already are in use to some extent. However, no risk management effort to date has employed all aspects of the Framework. Many of the questions and concerns associated with implementing the Framework will be clarified as it is applied and evaluated. However, gaining experience with the Framework can best be achieved if Congress and the Administration work together to overcome the statutory and administrative barriers described above.

In using this Framework, risk scientists and decision-makers will be embarking on an important new era in risk management designed to make wise use of limited risk management resources. As described throughout this report, the Framework’s advantages include:

The Commission envisions the Framework to be far more useful and effective than traditional regulatory approaches to solving common multimedia risk problems.