Committee on Risk Assessment of Hazardous Air Pollutants and The Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology
Date Published:
1994
Description:
The committee's findings are dominated by four central themes:
• Because of limitations on time, resources, scientific knowledge, and available data, EPA should generally retain its conservative, default-based approach to risk assessment for screening analysis in standard-setting; however, several corrective actions are needed to make this approach more effective.
• EPA should develop and use an iterative approach to risk assessment. This will lead to an improved understanding of the relationship between risk assessment and risk management and an appropriate blending of the two.
• The iterative approach proposed by the committee allows for improvements in the default-based approach by improving both models and the data used in analysis. For this approach to work properly, however, EPA needs to provide justification for its current defaults and establish a procedure that permits
departures from the default options.
• When EPA reports estimates of risk to decision-makers and the public, it should present not only point estimates of risk, but also the sources and magnitudes of uncertainty associated with these estimates.
Risk assessment is a set of tools, not an end in itself. The limited resources available should be spent to generate information that helps risk managers to choose the best possible course of action among the available options.
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