Integrating risk assessment and life cycle assessment: a case study of insulation.

Increasing residential insulation can decrease energy consumption and provide public health benefits, given changes in emissions from fuel combustion, but also has cost implications and ancillary risks and benefits. Risk assessment or life cycle assessment can be used to calculate the net impacts and determine whether more stringent energy codes or other conservation policies would be warranted, but few analyses have combined the critical elements of both methodologies In this article, we present the first portion of a combined analysis, with the goal of estimating the net public health impacts of increasing residential insulation for new housing from current practice to the latest International Energy Conservation Code (IECC 2000). We model state-by-state residential energy savings and evaluate particulate matter less than 2.5 microm in diameter (PM2.5), NOx, and SO2 emission reductions. We use past dispersion modeling results to estimate reductions in exposure, and we apply concentration-response functions for premature mortality and selected morbidity outcomes using current epidemiological knowledge of effects of PM2.5 (primary and secondary). We find that an insulation policy shift would save 3 x 10(14) British thermal units or BTU (3 x 10(17) J) over a 10-year period, resulting in reduced emissions of 1,000 tons of PM2.5, 30,000 tons of NOx, and 40,000 tons of SO2. These emission reductions yield an estimated 60 fewer fatalities during this period, with the geographic distribution of health benefits differing from the distribution of energy savings because of differences in energy sources, population patterns, and meteorology. We discuss the methodology to be used to integrate life cycle calculations, which can ultimately yield estimates that can be compared with costs to determine the influence of external costs on benefit-cost calculations.     

Life cycle impact assessment: a challenge for risk analysts.

Modern technology, together with an advanced economy, can provide a good or service in myriad ways, giving us choices on what to produce and how to produce it. To make those choices more intelligently, society needs to know not only the market price of each alternative, but the associated health and environmental consequences. A fair comparison requires evaluating the consequences across the whole "life cycle"--from the extraction of raw materials and processing to manufacture/construction, use, and end-of-life--of each alternative. Focusing on only one stage (e.g., manufacture) of the life cycle is often misleading. Unfortunately, analysts and researchers still have only rudimentary tools to quantify the materials and energy inputs and the resulting damage to health and the environment. Life cycle assessment (LCA) provides an overall framework for identifying and evaluating these implications. Since the 1960s, considerable progress has been made in developing methods for LCA, especially in characterizing, qualitatively and quantitatively, environmental discharges. However, few of these analyses have attempted to assess the quantitative impact on the environment and health of material inputs and environmental discharges Risk analysis and LCA are connected closely. While risk analysis has characterized and quantified the health risks of exposure to a toxicant, the policy implications have not been clear. Inferring that an occupational or public health exposure carries a nontrivial risk is only the first step in formulating a policy response. A broader framework, including LCA, is needed to see which response is likely to lower the risk without creating high risks elsewhere. Even more important, LCA has floundered at the stage of translating an inventory of environmental discharges into estimates of impact on health and the environment. Without the impact analysis, policymakers must revert to some simple rule, such as that all discharges, regardless of which chemical, which medium, and where they are discharged, are equally toxic. Thus, risk analysts should seek LCA guidance in translating a risk analysis into policy conclusions or even advice to those at risk. LCA needs the help of RA to go beyond simplistic assumptions about the implications of a discharge inventory. We demonstrate the need and rationale for LCA, present a brief history of LCA, present examples of the application of this tool, note the limitations of LCA models, and present several methods for incorporating risk assessment into LCA. However, we warn the reader not to expect too much. A comprehensive comparison of the health and environmental implications of alternatives is beyond the state of the art. LCA is currently not able to provide risk analysts with detailed information on the chemical form and location of the environmental discharges that would allow detailed estimation of the risks to individuals due to toxicants. For example, a challenge for risk analysts is to estimate health and other risks where the location and chemical speciation are not characterized precisely. Providing valuable information to decisionmakers requires advances in both LCA and risk analysis. These two disciplines should be closely linked, since each has much to contribute to the other.     

Intake fraction for multimedia pollutants: a tool for life cycle analysis and comparative risk assessment.

We employ the intake fraction (iF) as an effective tool for expressing the source-to-intake relationship for pollutant emissions in life cycle analysis (LCA) or comparative risk assessment. Intake fraction is the fraction of chemical mass emitted into the environment that eventually passes into a member of the population through inhalation, ingestion, or dermal exposure. To date, this concept has been primarily applied to pollutants whose primary route of exposure is inhalation. Here we extend the use of iF to multimedia pollutants with multiple exposure pathways. We use a level III multimedia model to calculate iF for TCDD and compare the result to one calculated from measured levels of dioxin toxic equivalents in the environment. We calculate iF for emissions to air and surface water for 308 chemicals. We correlate the primary exposure route with the magnitudes of the octanol-water partition coefficient, Kow, and of the air-water partitioning coefficient (dimensionless Henry constant), Kaw. This results in value ranges of Kow and Kaw where the chemical exposure route can be classified with limited input data requirements as primarily inhalation, primarily ingestion, or multipathway. For the inhalation and ingestion dominant pollutants, we also define empirical relationships based on chemical properties for quantifying the intake fraction. The empirical relationships facilitate rapid evaluation of many chemicals in terms of the intake. By defining a theoretical upper limit for iF in a multimedia environment we find that iF calculations provide insight into the multimedia model algorithms and help identify unusual patterns of exposure and questionable exposure model results.     

Life cycle emission distributions within the economy: implications for life cycle impact assessment.

Refinements of methods for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) are directed at removing unjustified simplifications and quantifying and reducing uncertainties in results. The amount of uncertainty reduction that is actually achieved through LCIA method refinement depends on the structure of the life cycle inventory model. We investigate the general structure of inventory models using an economic input/output (I/O) life cycle assessment model of the U.S. economy. In particular, we study the results of applying a streamlining algorithm to the I/O LCA model. The streamlining algorithm retains only those "branches" of the process tree that are jointly required to account for a specified fraction of the total impacts upstream of each point in the tree. We examine the implications of these "tree pruning" results for site-informed LCIA. Percentiles are presented for U.S. commodities and several important pollutants, for the share of total upstream emissions contributed by the set of processes in each supply tier, that is, each set of processes that directly supply inputs to another set of processes Capturing at least 90% of the total direct plus upstream emissions for criteria air pollutants and toxic releases for at least 75% of the commodities in the U.S. economy requires full modeling of direct emissions plus the first five supply tiers. The requirements for capturing a high percentage (e.g., >80%) of total emissions vary widely across products or commodities. To capture more than 60% of total emissions for more than half of all commodities requires models with more than 4,000 process instances. To well characterize the total impacts of products, life cycle impact assessment methods must characterize foreground process impacts in a site-informed way and mean impacts of far-removed processes in an unbiased way.     

Use of risk assessment and life cycle assessment in decision making: a common policy research agenda.

Quantitative risk assessment (RA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are both analytical tools used to support decision making in environmental management. They have been developed and used by largely separate groups of specialists, and it is worth considering whether there is a common research agenda that may increase the relevance of these tools in decision-making processes. The validity of drawing comparisons between use of the tools is established through examining key aspects of the two approaches for their similarities and differences, including the nature of each approach and contextual and methodological aspects. Six case studies involving use of each approach in public decision making are described and used to draw out concerns about using RA and LCA in this context. The following categories of concern can be distinguished: philosophical approach of the tools; quantitative versus qualitative assessment; stakeholder participation; the nature of the results; and the usefulness of the results in relation to time and financial resource requirements. These can be distilled into a common policy research agenda focusing on: the legitimacy of using tools built on a particular perspective in decision making; recognition and role of value judgments in RA and LCA; treatment of uncertainty and variability; the influence of analytical tools in focusing attention on particular aspects of a decision-making situation; and understandability of the results for nonspecialists. It is concluded that it is time to bring together the experiences of RA and LCA specialists and benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas.     

Six Propositions on Public Participation and Their Relevance for Risk Communication

New societal obligations for communicating risk information are emerging in a variety of contexts. This article draws upon the lengthy societal experience with citizen participation programs to identify how risk communication efforts may be effectively structured and implemented. Six major propositions address such themes as means/ends differences in expectations, the timing of the program, the role of credibility and trust, the need for technical and analytical resources, differing thresholds of public involvement, and limitations upon current understandings. Key conclusions for the design of risk communication programs are set forth.     

Assessing human health response in life cycle assessment using ED10s and DALYs: part 2--Noncancer effects.

In Part 1 of this article we developed an approach for the calculation of cancer effect measures for life cycle assessment (LCA). In this article, we propose and evaluate the method for the screening of noncancer toxicological health effects. This approach draws on the noncancer health risk assessment concept of benchmark dose, while noting important differences with regulatory applications in the objectives of an LCA study. We adopt the centraltendency estimate of the toxicological effect dose inducing a 10% response over background, ED10, to provide a consistent point of departure for default linear low-dose response estimates (betaED10). This explicit estimation of low-dose risks, while necessary in LCA, is in marked contrast to many traditional procedures for noncancer assessments. For pragmatic reasons, mechanistic thresholds and nonlinear low-dose response curves were not implemented in the presented framework. In essence, for the comparative needs of LCA, we propose that one initially screens alternative activities or products on the degree to which the associated chemical emissions erode their margins of exposure, which may or may not be manifested as increases in disease incidence. We illustrate the method here by deriving the betaED10 slope factors from bioassay data for 12 chemicals and outline some of the possibilities for extrapolation from other more readily available measures, such as the no observable adverse effect levels (NOAEL), avoiding uncertainty factors that lead to inconsistent degrees of conservatism from chemical to chemical. These extrapolations facilitated the initial calculation of slope factors for an additional 403 compounds; ranging from 10(-6) to 10(3) (risk per mg/kg-day dose). The potential consequences of the effects are taken into account in a preliminary approach by combining the betaED10 with the severity measure disability adjusted life years (DALY), providing a screening-level estimate of the potential consequences associated with exposures, integrated over time and space, to a given mass of chemical released into the environment for use in LCA.     

Assessing human health response in life cycle assessment using ED10s and DALYs: part 1--Cancer effects.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a framework for comparing products according to their total estimated environmental impact, summed over all chemical emissions and activities associated with a product at all stages in its life cycle (from raw material acquisition, manufacturing, use, to final disposal). For each chemical involved, the exposure associated with the mass released into the environment, integrated over time and space, is multiplied by a toxicological measure to estimate the likelihood of effects and their potential consequences. In this article, we explore the use of quantitative methods drawn from conventional single-chemical regulatory risk assessments to create a procedure for the estimation of the cancer effect measure in the impact phase of LCA. The approach is based on the maximum likelihood estimate of the effect dose inducing a 10% response over background, ED10, and default linear low-dose extrapolation using the slope betaED10 (0.1/ED10). The calculated effects may correspond to residual risks below current regulatory compliance requirements that occur over multiple generations and at multiple locations; but at the very least they represent a "using up" of some portion of the human population's ability to accommodate emissions. Preliminary comparisons are performed with existing measures, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (U.S. EPA's) slope factor measure q1*. By analyzing bioassay data for 44 chemicals drawn from the EPA's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database, we explore estimating ED10 from more readily available information such as the median tumor dose rate TD50 and the median single lethal dose LD50. Based on the TD50, we then estimate the ED10 for more than 600 chemicals. Differences in potential consequences, or severity, are addressed by combining betaED10 with the measure disability adjusted life years per affected person, DALYp. Most of the variation among chemicals for cancer effects is found to be due to differences in the slope factors (betaED10) ranging from 10(-4) up to 10(4) (risk of cancer/mg/kg-day).     

Public Acceptance of Fully Automated Driving: Effects of Social Trust and Risk/Benefit Perceptions

Automated driving (AD) is one of the most significant technical advances in the transportation industry. Its safety, economic, and environmental benefits cannot be realized if it is not used. To explain, predict, and increase its acceptance, we need to understand how people perceive and why they accept or reject AD technology. Drawing upon the trust heuristic, we tested a psychological model to explain three acceptance measures of fully AD (FAD): general acceptance, willingness to pay (WTP), and behavioral intention (BI). This heuristic suggests that social trust can directly affect acceptance or indirectly affect acceptance through perceived benefits and risks. Using a survey (N = 441), we found that social trust retained a direct effect as well as an indirect effect on all FAD acceptance measures. The indirect effect of social trust was more prominent in forming general acceptance; the direct effect of social trust was more prominent in explaining WTP and BI. Compared to perceived risk, perceived benefit was a stronger predictor of all FAD acceptance measures and also a stronger mediator of the trust–acceptance relationship. Predictive ability of the proposed model for the three acceptance measures was confirmed. We discuss the implications of our results for theory and practice.     

Life-Cycle Assessment in Relation to Risk Assessment: An Evolving Perspective

A life-cycle approach takes a cradle-to-grave perspective of a product's numerous activities from the raw material extraction to final disposal. There have been recent efforts to develop life-cycle assessment (LCA) to assess both environmental and human health issues. The question then arises: what are the capabilities of LCA, especially in relation to risk assessment? To address this question, this paper first describes the LCA mass-based accounting system and then analyzes the use of this approach for environmental and human health assessment. The key LCA limitations in this respect are loss of spatial, temporal, dose-response, and threshold information. These limitations affect LCA's capability to assess several environmental issues, and human health in particular. This leads to the conclusion that LCA impact assessment does not predict or measure actual effects, quantitate risks, or address safety. Instead, LCA uses mass loadings with simplifying assumptions and subjective judgments to add independent effects and exposures into an overall score. As a result, LCA identifies possible human health issues on a systemwide basis from a worst case, hypothetical hazard perspective. Ideally, the identified issues would then be addressed by more detailed assessment methods, such as risk assessment.     

Assessing the Multidimensionality of Coastal Erosion Risks: Public Participation and Multicriteria Analysis in a Mediterranean Coastal System

The complex and multidimensional nature of coastal erosion risks makes it necessary to move away from single-perspective assessment and management methods that have conventionally predominated in coastal management. This article explores the suitability of participatory multicriteria analysis (MCA) for improving the integration of diverse expertises and values and enhancing the social-ecological robustness of the processes that lead to the definition of relevant policy options to deal with those risks. We test this approach in the Mediterranean coastal locality of Lido de Sète in France. Results show that the more adaptive alternatives such as "retreating the shoreline" were preferred by our selected stakeholders to those corresponding to "protecting the shoreline" and the business as usual proposals traditionally put forward by experts and policymakers on these matters. Participative MCA contributed to represent coastal multidimensionality, elicit and integrate different views and preferences, facilitated knowledge exchange, and allowed highlighting existing uncertainties.     

Using Surveys in Public Participation Processes for Risk Decision Making: The Case of the 2003 British GM Nation? Public Debate

This article takes as its case study the “GM Nation?” public debate, a major participation process on the commercialization of agricultural biotechnology, which occurred in Britain during the summer of 2003. We investigate possible self‐selection biases in over 36,000 open questionnaire responses on the risks and benefits of genetically modified crops and food obtained during GM Nation? A comparison sample of equivalent responses from a statistically representative sample (n= 1,363) of the British general public obtained shortly after the conclusion of the debate is reported. This comparison shows that the GM Nation? open responses were indeed not fully representative of British “public opinion” regarding agricultural biotechnology. Rather, such opinion is not a unitary whole, but fragmented, with considerable ambivalence coexisting alongside outright opposition to GM agriculture. The methodological implications for multistage participation processes are discussed: in particular, the need to anticipate outcomes of complex design decisions, and to include representative public surveys as standard where measures of broader public attitudes to risk are an important objective.     

Safety Management and Public Spaces: Restoring Balance

Since 2000, the reputation of health and safety in the United Kingdom has been tarnished, so much so that it has become the subject of both a media circus and a government inquiry. This not only threatens the worthy goals of health and safety, but also impacts upon the associated tool of risk assessment itself such that "risk assessment" is increasingly seen by the public at large as a term inviting ridicule, even abuse. The main thrust of the government's examination of health and safety has been its concern that safety requirements were placing a disproportionate burden on business. However, there is another source of discontent, which is public chagrin over the impact of injury control measures upon life beyond the conventional workplace, in particular upon the public spaces that people frequent in their leisure time and on the activities they engage in there. This article provides a perspective on this second dimension of the crisis in confidence. It describes how many U.K. agencies with responsibilities for a wide portfolio of public amenities ranging from the provision of play spaces for the young to the management of publicly accessible countryside, the maintenance of urban and rural trees, the stewardship of sites of cultural heritage, and the pursuit of outdoor educational activities have responded to some conflicts posed to their services by the new safety culture. It concludes with a discussion of implications for the management of public space and for risk assessment itself.     

Forest Fire Risk Management and Public Participation in Changing Socioenvironmental Conditions: A Case Study in a Mediterranean Region

Under current conditions of accelerated socioenvironmental change in the Mediterranean forested landscapes, fire is one of the most critical and difficult risks to tackle within the region. This article summarizes the lessons learned from a project based on the participatory integration of qualitative local stakeholders' knowledge with expert GIS fire simulations carried out in the County of El Bages, Catalonia, Spain. First, in this article, a theoretical model--the forest fire circle--is presented in order to explain the reasons for the rise in the damage and frequency of forest fires in this Mediterranean area. Second, it describes the methodology developed and the stages followed during the project. Results show that: (1) the advocacy of old forest reactive management paradigm assumptions and practices based on uncontrolled forest succession can put vast wooded areas of the Mediterranean basin at critical risk; and (2) forest fire management approaches that ignore the crucial role of long-term prevention and local capacity building strategies have failed. In the final section, the content and the specific dimensions of the old reactive paradigm that has characterized forest fire risk management in Catalonia are discussed and contrasted with the possibly emerging preventative paradigm.     

Development of a Public Participation and Communication Protocol for Establishing Fish Consumption Advisories

Enabling people to make an informed choice on whether to change consumption behavior is ultimately the objective of any fish consumption advisory. This will occur only if people are aware of the advisory, know and understand the advisory information, and believe the information to be true. Interactive, meaningful communication and the opportunity to participate in the process to develop and review advisories are key to achieving these attributes. A case study was undertaken in a community in Alberta, Canada (where an existing advisory was under consideration for review) to determine public awareness, knowledge, compliance, communication effectiveness, information needs, and desire for involvement related to the advisory. The information obtained from this case study was used to develop 14 guiding principles as a foundation for the incorporation of public participation and risk communication into the process of developing and reviewing fish consumption advisories.     

Applications of probabilistic risk assessments: the selection of appropriate tools

Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is an important methodology for assessing the risks of complex technologies. This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of PRA. Its application is explored in three different settings: adversarial policy processes, regulatory/licensing procedures, and plant safety audits. It is concluded that PRA is a valuable tool for auditing safety precautions of existing or planned technologies, especially when it is carried out as an interactive process involving designers and plant personnel who are familiar with actual, everyday operations. PRA has not proven to be as well-suited in providing absolute risk estimates in public-policy debates concerning the acceptability of a technology, or for the licensing and regulatory procedures. The reasons for this are discussed.     

小样本数据信用风险评估研究

针对我国商业银行信用风险评估有效历史数据样本容量小的特点 ,本文提出了一种小样本情况下的信用风险评估建模技术 ,该方法通过样本的重复使用 ,提高了有限样本的使用效率 ,减小了预测的偏差 .实证结果表明 ,与传统的判别分析方法相比 ,该方法建立的信用评估模型精度更高     

Leveraging risk assessment for foodborne outbreak investigations: The Quantitative Risk Assessment-Epidemic Curve Prediction Model

Root cause analysis can be used in foodborne illness outbreak investigations to determine the underlying causes of an outbreak and to help identify actions that could be taken to prevent future outbreaks. We developed a new tool, the Quantitative Risk Assessment-Epidemic Curve Prediction Model (QRA-EC), to assist with these goals and applied it to a case study to investigate and illustrate the utility of leveraging quantitative risk assessment to provide unique insights for foodborne illness outbreak root cause analysis. We used a 2019 Salmonella outbreak linked to melons as a case study to demonstrate the utility of this model (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2019). The model was used to evaluate the impact of various root cause hypotheses (representing different contamination sources and food safety system failures in the melon supply chain) on the predicted number and timeline of illnesses. The predicted number of illnesses varied by contamination source and was strongly impacted by the prevalence and level of Salmonella contamination on the surface/inside of whole melons and inside contamination niches on equipment surfaces. The timeline of illnesses was most strongly impacted by equipment sanitation efficacy for contamination niches. Evaluations of a wide range of scenarios representing various potential root causes enabled us to identify which hypotheses, were likely to result in an outbreak of similar size and illness timeline to the 2019 Salmonella melon outbreak. The QRA-EC framework can be adapted to accommodate any food–pathogen pairs to provide insights for foodborne outbreak investigations.     

Evaluating the life cycle of a building: A multivariant and multiple criteria approach

This paper considers the application of methodology for the multivariant design and multiple criteria analysis of the life cycle of a building. The theoretical basis of the methodology is developed. A proposed methodology allows everyone (i.e. client, investor, contractor, etc.), who has to make the decisions, to design alternatives of the building life cycle and to evaluate its qualitative and quantitative aspects. This approach, in which various criteria can be employed, is intended to support the decision making on a building's life cycle selection and increase the efficiency of the resolution process. The procedure of the evaluating of a building's life cycle is discussed using an example.     

Municipal Waste Management: Inequities and the Role of Deliberation

Like radioactive waste, municipal solid waste (MSW) requires consideration of a complex mix of intergenerational and intragenerational risks surrounded by uncertain science. Unlike radioactive waste, MSW is a common problem and hence one often perceived to be controllable, at least until a required facility is proposed in a particular community. The intragenerational risks focused on local communities rouse intense public pressures for management. Although some of the risks can be quantified, the risk assessment process cannot deal with all questions. This article examines the multiple dimensions of the decisions required to be made and the weaknesses of a number of decision tools traditionally used. A case is made for the need to integrate decision tools appropriate to the risks into reflexive and iterative decision processes open to public involvement. It is argued that this presents the best hope of both optimizing decisions about the intragenerational risks as well as raising public debate about the importance of sustainable waste management in transgenerational terms.