Author : Mary O'Brien
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 21,47 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780262650533
This work recommends a simple yet profound shift to another decision-making technique: alternatives assessment. Instead of asking how much of a hazardous activity is safe, alternatives assessment asks how we can avoid or minimize damage.
Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 48,24 MB
Release : 2009-03-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0309120462
Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis. However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment. Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.
Author : Mark Burgman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 19,96 MB
Release : 2005-04-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780521543019
This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.
Author : Douglas J. Crawford-Brown
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 49,79 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1461552273
Risk-Based Environmental Decision: Methods and Culture presents the principles of human health risk analysis as they are applied in environmental decisions. It balances the discussion of scientific theory and methods, philosophical analysis, and applications in regulatory decisions. The material is directed towards risk analysts who must apply their skills in a policy setting, and towards policy analysts who must use risk estimates. The presentation is suited ideally as an introductory text on the methods of risk analysis and on the cultural issues that underlie these methodologies. An important feature of Risk-Based Environmental Decision: Methods and Culture is that it is designed around a series of detailed case studies of environmental risk analysis which walk the reader from the historical nature of the problem, to the formulation as a risk-based problem, to the conduct of risk analysis, and on to the application, debate, and defense of the risk analysis.
Author : In c. ABS Consulting
Publisher : Government Institutes
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 32,4 MB
Release : 2002-02
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0865879087
Principles of Risk-Based Decision Making provides managers with the foundation for creating a proactive organizational culture that systematically incorporates risk into key decision-making processes. Based on methodology adopted by a number of organizations including the federal government, this book examines risk-based decision making as a process for organizing information about the possibility for unwanted outcomes in a simple, practical way that helps decision makers make timely, informed management choices that minimize harmful effects on safety and health, the environment, property loss, or mission success. Citing practical examples, charts, and checklists, the authors break the risk-based decision making process into five key components: establishing the decision structure, performing the risk assessment, managing sufficient risks, monitoring effectiveness of adopted risk controls through impact assessment, and facilitating risk communication. They examine each component in detail and outline available decision analysis and risk assessment tools that aid in each of these risk-based decision making functions. This book also walks readers through eight project management steps—from scoping a risk assessment to evaluating the recommendations—the components of each, and the importance of these steps to the success of a risk assessment. Special features include a table for applying the risk-based decision-making process, a hazard identification guidesheet, an example of human error, an acronym list, and a glossary.
Author : Paolo Ricci
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 50,9 MB
Release : 2006-01-27
Category : Medical
ISBN : 1402037767
This book is about the legal, economical, and practical assessment and management of risky activities arising from routine, catastrophic environmental and occupational exposures to hazardous agents. It includes a discussion of aspects of US and European Union law concerning risky activities, and then develops the economic analyses that are relevant to implementing choices within a supply and demand framework. The book also discusses exposure-response and time-series models used in assessing air and water pollution, as well as probabilistic cancer models, including toxicological compartmental, pharmaco-kinetic models and epidemiological relative risks and odds ratios-based models. Statistical methods to measure agreement, correlation and discordance are also developed. The methods and criteria of decision-analysis, including several measures of value of information (VOI) conclude the expositions. This book is an excellent text for students studying risk assessment and management.
Author : Paul Pritchard
Publisher : Earthscan
Page : 126 pages
File Size : 31,15 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781853835988
First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author : Antonio Marcomini
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 446 pages
File Size : 47,54 MB
Release : 2008-12-16
Category : Science
ISBN : 0387097228
Decision Support Systems for Risk-Based Management of Contaminated Sites addresses decision making in environmental risk management for contaminated sites, focusing on the potential role of decision support systems in informing the management of chemical pollutants and their effects. Considering the environmental relevance and the financial impacts of contaminated sites all over the post-industrialized countries and the complexity of decision making in environmental risk management, decision support systems can be used by decision makers in order to have a more structured analysis of a problem at hand and define possible options of intervention to solve the problem. Accordingly, the book provides an analysis of the main steps and tools for the development of decision support systems, namely: environmental risk assessment, decision analysis, spatial analysis and geographic information system, indicators and endpoints. Sections are dedicated to the review of decision support systems for contaminated land management and for inland and coastal waters management. Both include discussions of management problem formulation and of the application of specific decision support systems. This book is a valuable support for environmental risk managers and for decision makers involved in a sustainable management of contaminated sites, including contaminated lands, river basins and coastal lagoons. Furthermore, it is a basic tool for the environmental scientists who gather data and perform assessments to support decisions, developers of decision support systems, students of environmental science and members of the public who wish to understand the assessment science that supports remedial decisions.
Author : David Demortain
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 453 pages
File Size : 42,93 MB
Release : 2020-01-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 026253794X
How the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which they were conceived; how they were used; and how they served to legitimize the EPA. Demortain argues that the EPA is structurally embedded in controversy, resulting in constant reevaluation of its credibility and fueling the evolution of the knowledge and technologies it uses to produce decisions and to create a legitimate image of how and why it acts on the environment. He describes the emergence and institutionalization of the risk assessment–risk management framework codified in the National Research Council's Red Book, and its subsequent unraveling as the agency's mission evolved toward environmental justice, ecological restoration, and sustainability, and as controversies over determining risk gained vigor in the 1990s. Through its rise and fall at the EPA, risk decision-making enshrines the science of a bureaucracy that learns how to make credible decisions and to reform itself, amid constant conflicts about the environment, risk, and its own legitimacy.
Author : Yacov Y. Haimes
Publisher :
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 21,94 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Risk assessment
ISBN :
