Risk Assessment for Invasive Species

Although estimates vary, there is a broad agreement that invasive species impose major costs on the U.S. economy, as well as posing risks to nonmarket environmental goods and services and to public health. The domestic effort to manage risks associated with invasive species is coordinated by the National Invasive Species Council (NISC), which is charged with developing a science-based process to evaluate risks associated with the introduction and spread of invasive species. Various international agreements have also elevated invasive species issues onto the international policy agenda. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement establishes rights and obligations to adhere to the discipline of scientific risk assessment to ensure that SPS measures are applied only to the extent required to protect human, animal, and plant health, and do not constitute arbitrary or unjustifiable technical barriers to trade. Currently, however, the field of risk assessment for invasive species is in its infancy. Therefore, there is a pressing need to formulate scientifically sound methods and approaches in this emerging field, while acknowledging that the demand for situation-specific empirical evidence is likely to persistently outstrip supply. To begin addressing this need, the Society for Risk Analysis Ecological Risk Assessment Specialty Group and the Ecological Society of America Theoretical Ecology Section convened a joint workshop to provide independent scientific input into the formulation of methods and processes for risk assessment of invasive species to ensure that the analytic processes used domestically and internationally will be firmly rooted in sound scientific principles.     

Media Disaster Reporting Effects on Public Risk Perception and Response to Escalating Tornado Warnings: A Natural Experiment

Previous research has evaluated public risk perception and response to a natural hazards in various settings; however, most of these studies were conducted either with a single scenario or after a natural disaster struck. To better understand the dynamic relationships among affect, risk perception, and behavioral intentions related to natural disasters, the current study implements a simulation scenario with escalating weather intensity, and includes a natural experiment allowing comparison of public response before and after a severe tornado event with extensive coverage by the national media. The current study also manipulated the display of warning information, and investigated whether the warning system display format influences public response. Results indicate that (1) affect, risk perception, and behavioral intention escalated as weather conditions deteriorated, (2) responses at previous stages predicted responses at subsequent stages of storm progression, and (3) negative affect predicted risk perception. Moreover, risk perception and behavioral intention were heightened after exposure to the media coverage of an actual tornado disaster. However, the display format manipulation did not influence behavioral responses. The current study provides insight regarding public perception of predisaster warnings and the influence of exposure to media coverage of an actual disaster event.     

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.     

Effects of information on college students' perceptions of antidepressant medication

The authors examined the impact of pharmaceutical companies' advertisements on college students' perceptions of depression and concomitant treatment with antidepressants among 13 male and 31 female undergraduates from a midwestern university. The students were randomly assigned to groups that read either pharmaceutical company advertisements or scientific information about depression and its treatment. The analysis revealed that 40% of the women in the advertisement condition as opposed to 1 woman (6%) in the scientific condition rated themselves as having mild, moderate, or severe depression on the Beck Depression Inventory, second edition. Women in the advertisement condition were significantly more likely to believe that depression required treatment with antidepressant medication and were more willing than women in the scientific condition to suggest antidepressant treatment to others.     

LEGISLATING LOVE: The Effect of Child Support and Welfare Policies on Father–child Contact

Reducing non-marital childbearing and making nonresidential fathers take greater responsibility for their children were identified as goals of numerous policy changes since the 1980s. Child-support award rates for children born to unmarried parents have been quite low historically, leading lawmakers to focus on increasing both award and payment rates for this group. Nonmarital fathers are also much less likely to have contact with their children. Although evidence suggests that policy efforts increase child support awards and receipt, the link between child support policies, child support outcomes, and father-child contact has received less attention. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation on children born between 1985–1997 to investigate the relationship between child-support award and receipt and the amount of contact that fathers have with their non-residential children. Since it is likely that both of these behaviors are, in part, determined by unobservable characteristics of the father, we estimate an instrumental variables Tobit model. The model is identified by our assumption that child support policy variables can impact child support awards and payments, but father-child contact cannot be directly legislated. Our results suggest that there are unintended, but desirable effects of child support establishment and collection. Policies to collect child support not only increase financial resources to families, but through their impact on payments increase visitation and contact between these children and their fathers. The estimated impact of receiving child support on contact is more than 27 days per year.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, Washington DC, January 2003 and the Annual Meetings of the Association of Public Policy and Management, November 2003. Support from NICHD Grant # HD30944 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Suzann Eshleman for excellent computer programming and James Scully for providing us with data on genetic testing laws.     

Portfolio Analysis of Layered Security Measures

Layered defenses are necessary for protecting the public from terrorist attacks. Designing a system of such defensive measures requires consideration of the interaction of these countermeasures. In this article, we present an analysis of a layered security system within the lower Manhattan area. It shows how portfolios of security measures can be evaluated through portfolio decision analysis. Consideration is given to the total benefits and costs of the system. Portfolio diagrams are created that help communicate alternatives among stakeholders who have differing views on the tradeoffs between security and economic activity.     

Diesel Engine Exhaust and Lung Cancer Mortality: Time‐Related Factors in Exposure and Risk

To develop a quantitative exposure‐response relationship between concentrations and durations of inhaled diesel engine exhaust (DEE) and increases in lung cancer risks, we examined the role of temporal factors in modifying the estimated effects of exposure to DEE on lung cancer mortality and characterized risk by mine type in the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study (DEMS) cohort, which followed 12,315 workers through December 1997. We analyzed the data using parametric functions based on concepts of multistage carcinogenesis to directly estimate the hazard functions associated with estimated exposure to a surrogate marker of DEE, respirable elemental carbon (REC). The REC‐associated risk of lung cancer mortality in DEMS is driven by increased risk in only one of four mine types (limestone), with statistically significant heterogeneity by mine type and no significant exposure‐response relationship after removal of the limestone mine workers. Temporal factors, such as duration of exposure, play an important role in determining the risk of lung cancer mortality following exposure to REC, and the relative risk declines after exposure to REC stops. There is evidence of effect modification of risk by attained age. The modifying impact of temporal factors and effect modification by age should be addressed in any quantitative risk assessment (QRA) of DEE. Until there is a better understanding of why the risk appears to be confined to a single mine type, data from DEMS cannot reliably be used for QRA.     

Counter-geographies: The campaign against rationalisation of agricultural research stations in New South Wales, Australia

This paper discusses an example of community action mounted in a rural region of New South Wales, Australia, in response to proposals by the State Government to rationalise agricultural research stations operated by the Department of Primary Industries. Informed by a Foucaultian understanding of power and the concept of governmentality, neoliberalism is theorised as being the broad governmental context in which rationalisation proposals were put forward. Recent literature drawing on this theoretical perspective has emphasised that neoliberalism is enacted through a relationship of power, and is not monolithic or inevitable. Neoliberalism is always negotiated by those seeking to govern and those who are the object of such governmental actions. This paper analyses how plans to rationalise publicly funded agricultural research stations were opposed by those seeking to keep research facilities open in the case study area. The paper discusses the methods and scope of community action and, drawing on interviews, identifies a series of discourses articulated by campaigners. Non-local actors were depicted as uncaring and insensitive. In contrast, campaigners discussed the emergence of a ‘city-country divide’ in domestic politics; the need for specialist agricultural knowledge given the region's unique geographical location; and local impacts of an economic, social and emotional nature. Central were discourses of maintaining community, tradition, and continuity in unique local places defined by their climate, biophysical environment and economy. These were ‘counter-geographies’ that sought (successfully, it would transpire) to disrupt the state's imagined geography of a homogenous and flexible administrative space in which research services could be relocated wherever most efficient. Important too were embodied resistances to the way rural industries and people were subjected. Campaigners refused to accept preferred codes of neoliberal behaviour (particularly mobility and rationality) and instead demanded respect for their careers, families and communities. Important considerations are suggested for further research on impacts and negotiations of neoliberalism. This study particularly highlights the successes—as well as contradictions and limitations—of arguments that construct rural places as socialised, unique and unfairly treated (by governments), in opposition to metropolitan dominance and ‘placeless’ neoliberalism.     

Reconstructing child welfare through participatory and child‐centred professional practice: a conceptual approach1

The ‘child’ in child welfare/protection is seen as a dependent waif and an object of interest, on whose behalf adults speak and act. An alternative perspective has argued for child‐centredness, and includes concepts of child liberation, rights and citizenship. Policymakers and practitioners who may accept the underlying principles may be concerned about the appropriateness and applicability of such principles in relation to practice with children and their parents in child welfare/protection cases. This paper discusses a conceptual framework for research that aims to explore participatory and child‐centred professional practice by critically evaluating and developing, for professional practice, the practical meanings of ‘participatory’ and ‘children as citizens’. We do not present research outcomes based on empirical data; instead, we present our conceptual framework as the first stage of research in progress into participatory and child‐centred professional practice.     

Globalisierung und die Veränderung sozialer Ungleichheiten in modernen Gesellschaften

This article deals with the effects of globalization on individual life courses and employment careers and the resulting changes in patterns of social inequality in modern societies. Empirically, we draw back to results from the international research project GLOBALIFE which studied the effects of globalization on modern life courses for the first time. The results show that the effects of globalization on individual life courses show marked differentiation with regards to specific life course phases: while especially the employment of mid-career men remained considerably stable under globalization, the careers of young adults, mid-career women as well as late-career workers underwent significant alterations. At the same time, results from the GLOABLIFE study indicate that the changes induced by globalization have not yet led to identical results at the national level. Globalization appears to be differentially filtered by deeply embedded and path-dependent national institutions. These “institutional packages” entail variable forms of labour market “flexibilisation” which themselves differentially shape patterns of social inequality in modern societies: While Scandinavian countries have largely succeeded in limiting an increase in social inequality under globalization through active public welfare engagement, globalization has led to a significant amplification of social inequalities in other regime types, either between labour market insiders and outsiders (in conservative and Southern European countries) or between individuals with different human capital resources (in liberal countries).