Environmental Health and Hazard Risk Assessment: Principles and Calculations explains how to evaluate and apply environmental health and hazard risk assessment calculations in a variety of real-life settings. Using a wealth of examples and case studies, the book helps readers develop both a theoretical understanding and a working knowledge of the principles of health, safety, and accident management. Learn the Fundamentals of Health, Safety, and Accident Management The book takes a pragmatic approach to risk assessment, identifying problems and outlining solutions. Organized into four parts, the text: Presents an overview of the history of environmental health and hazard problems, legal considerations, and emergency planning and response Tackles the broad subject of health risk assessment, discussing toxicology, exposure, and health risk characterization Examines hazard risk assessment in significant detail—from problem identification, probability, consequence, and characterization of hazards/accidents to the fundamentals of applicable statistics theory Uses case studies to demonstrate the applications and calculations of risk analysis for real systems Incorporate Health and Safety in Process Design The book assumes only a basic background in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, making it suitable for students and those new to the field. It is also a valuable reference for practicing engineers, scientists, technicians, technical managers, and others tasked with ensuring that plant and equipment operations meet applicable standards and regulations. A clear and comprehensive resource, this book offers guidance for those who want to reduce or eliminate the environmental health effects and accidents that can result in loss of life, materials, and property.

This overview of the role played by the precautionary principle in international trade law, European law and national law compares how precautionary considerations have been applied in the fields of pesticide regulation and the regulation of base stations for mobile telephones in Sweden, the UK and the US. A number of problems in the current application of the precautionary principle are identified and discussed. For example, it is shown that a firm reliance on a wide and open-ended precautionary principle may lead to problems with the consistency, foreseeability, effectiveness and efficiency of measures intended to reduce environmental or health risks. It is suggested that the precautionary principle indeed may be an important tool, but that in order to be acceptable it must be coupled with strong requirements on the performance of risk assessments, cost/benefit analyses and risk trade-off analyses.

The purpose of risk assessment is to support science-based decisions about how to solve complex societal problems. Indeed, the problems humankind faces in the 21st century have many social, political, and technical complexities. Environmental risk assessment in particular is of increasing importance as health and safety regulations grow and become more complicated. Environmental Risk Assessment: A Toxicological Approach, 2nd Edition looks at various factors relating to exposure and toxicity, human health, and risk. In addition to the original chapters being updated and expanded upon, four new chapters discuss current software and platforms that have recently been developed and provide examples of risk characterizations and scenarios. Features: Introduces the science of risk assessment—past, present, and future Provides environmental sampling data for conducting practice risk assessments Considers how bias and conflict of interest affect science-based decisions in the 21st century Includes fully worked examples, case studies, discussion questions, and suggestions for additional reading Discusses new software and computational platforms that have developed since the first edition Aimed at the next generation of risk assessors and students who need to know more about developing, conducting, and interpreting risk assessments, the book delivers a comprehensive view of the field, complete with sufficient background to enable readers to probe for themselves the science underlying the key issues in environmental risk.

Recently, environmental scientists have been required to perform a new type of assessment-ecological risk assessment. This is the first book that explains how to perform ecological risk assessments and gives assessors access to the full range of useful data, models, and conceptual approaches they need to perform an accurate assessment. It explains how ecological risk assessment relates to more familiar types of assessments. It also shows how to organize and conduct an ecological risk assessment, including defining the source, selecting endpoints, describing the relevant features of the receiving environment, estimating exposure, estimating effects, characterizing the risks, and interacting with the risk manager. Specific technical topics include finding and selecting toxicity data; statistical and mathematical models of effects on organisms, populations, and ecosystems; estimation of chemical fate parameters; modeling of chemical transport and fate; estimation of chemical uptake by organisms; and estimation, propagation, and presentation of uncertainty. Ecological Risk Assessment also covers conventional risk assessments, risk assessments for existing contamination, large scale problems, exotic organisms, and risk assessments based on environmental monitoring. Environmental assessors at regulatory agencies, consulting firms, industry, and government labs need this book for its approaches and methods for ecological risk assessment. Professors in ecology and other environmental sciences will find the book's practical preparation useful for classroom instruction. Environmental toxicologists and chemists will appreciate the discussion of the utility for risk assessment of particular toxicity tests and chemical determinations.

Research on gene drive systems is rapidly advancing. Many proposed applications of gene drive research aim to solve environmental and public health challenges, including the reduction of poverty and the burden of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue, which disproportionately impact low and middle income countries. However, due to their intrinsic qualities of rapid spread and irreversibility, gene drive systems raise many questions with respect to their safety relative to public and environmental health. Because gene drive systems are designed to alter the environments we share in ways that will be hard to anticipate and impossible to completely roll back, questions about the ethics surrounding use of this research are complex and will require very careful exploration. Gene Drives on the Horizon outlines the state of knowledge relative to the science, ethics, public engagement, and risk assessment as they pertain to research directions of gene drive systems and governance of the research process. This report offers principles for responsible practices of gene drive research and related applications for use by investigators, their institutions, the research funders, and regulators.

The regulation of potentially hazardous substances has become a controversial issue. This volume evaluates past efforts to develop and use risk assessment guidelines, reviews the experience of regulatory agencies with different administrative arrangements for risk assessment, and evaluates various proposals to modify procedures. The book's conclusions and recommendations can be applied across the entire field of environmental health.

The "precautionary principle" -- the environmental version of the admonition first, do no harm -- is now enshrined in numerous international environmental agreements including treaties addressing global warming, biological diversity, and various pollutants. Some environmentalists have invoked this principle to justify policies to control, if not ban, any technology that cannot be proven to cause no harm. In this innovative book, Goklany shows that the current use of the precautionary principle to justify such policies is flawed and could be counterproductive because it ignores the possible calamities those very policies might simultaneously create or prolong. The precautionary principle, unfortunately, does not provide any method of resolving such dilemmas, which are commonplace in the field of environmental policy. To address that problem, Goklany develops a framework consistent with the precautionary principle to resolve such dilemmas. That framework ranks potential threats to the environment on the basis of their nature, magnitude, immediacy, uncertainty, persistence, and the extent to which they can be alleviated. Applying that framework to three contentious environmental policy issues facing humanity and the globe -- DDT, bioengineered crops, and global warming -- Goklany shows that some popular policy prescriptions, despite good intentions, are in fact likely to do more harm than good.