A Pathway to Linking Risk and Sustainability Assessments

Abstract

The US National Research Council recently released a report promoting sustainability assessment as the future of environmental regulation. Thirty years earlier, this organization (under the same senior author) had issued a similar report promoting risk assessment as a new method for improving the science behind regulatory decisions. Tools for risk assessment were subsequently developed and adopted in state and federal agencies throughout the US. Since then, limitations of the traditional forms of risk assessment have prompted some dramatic modifications toward cumulative assessments that combine multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors in community settings. At present, however, there is little momentum within the risk assessment community for abandoning this evolved system in favor of a new sustainability-based one. The key question is, how best to proceed? Should sustainability principles be incorporated into current risk assessment procedures, or vice versa? Widespread recognition of the importance of sustainability offers no clear guidance for the risk assessment community, especially in light of institutional commitments to sustainability tools and definitions that appear to have little in common with cumulative risk notions. The purpose of this paper is to reframe the sustainability challenge for risk assessors by offering analytical guidance to chart a way out. We adopt a decision analysis framework to

Aligning Competing Risks? Global Food Security as a Trade-Offs-Based Approach to Risk and Food Policy

“…Such an approach clearly impacts the very notion of sustainability, which is reduced to a trade-off between conflicting objectives, thus constituting a conservative vision of sustainability (Linder & Sexton, 2014).…”

Integrated Assessment of Risk and Sustainability in the Context of Regulatory Decision Making

“…As summarized in Table 5, there are fundamentally four ways to reconceptualize the roles of the RA−RM paradigm and sustainability evaluation in the context of regulatory decisionmaking. 45 First, risk and sustainability can be thought of as independent but complementary and overlapping analytic domains, wherein risk and sustainability assessment are conducted separately and results of both are used in making decisions. Second, risk can be viewed as the overarching conceptual construct within which sustainability is evaluated, which implies treating sustainability evaluation as a subsidiary feature of the RA−RM paradigm.…”

“…And fourth, sustainability and risk could be merged into a single hybrid, analytical domain that does not subordinate one to the other, and that entails an integrated diagnostic approach producing a distinct, amalgamated result. 45 Independent risk assessments are routinely conducted to organize and analyze scientific information related to regulatory-relevant effects on the environment and public health. Economic and social factors are considered separately (and usually informally) as part of the subsequent risk management phase.…”

“…The ultimate goal (some would say "holy grail") is to be able to evaluate both risk and sustainability in one seamless, unified procedure. 45…”

“…On the positive side, we find that different definitions of sustainability are more or less adaptable to the RA−RM paradigm and can interact with risk-based approaches in distinctive ways. 45 Similarly, different structuring of the RA− RM paradigm can make it more or less compatible with sustainability evaluation. As cumulative notions of risk become more prominent, the kinds of data necessary to complete an inclusive risk assessment begin to overlap with the data needed for a sustainability assessment.…”