This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.

This book outlines the creative process of making environmental management decisions using the approach called Structured Decision Making. It is a short introductory guide to this popular form of decision making and is aimed at environmental managers and scientists. This is a distinctly pragmatic label given to ways for helping individuals and groups think through tough multidimensional choices characterized by uncertain science, diverse stakeholders, and difficult tradeoffs. This is the everyday reality of environmental management, yet many important decisions currently are made on an ad hoc basis that lacks a solid value-based foundation, ignores key information, and results in selection of an inferior alternative. Making progress – in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible and transparent – requires combining analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences and applied ecology with deliberative insights from cognitive psychology, facilitation and negotiation. The authors review key methods and discuss case-study examples based in their experiences in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings. The goal of this book is to lay out a compelling guide that will change how you think about making environmental decisions. Visit www.wiley.com/go/gregory/ to access the figures and tables from the book.

This important new text introduces conservation criminology as the interdisciplinary study of environmental exploitation and risks at the intersection of human and natural systems. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book enhances understanding of the various human and organizational behaviors that pose risks to the environment, humans, and drive conservation crime. As human population growth, global market economies, climate change, deforestation, and illegal exploitation of natural resources continue to increase, academic research from numerous disciplines is needed to address these challenges. Conservation Criminology promotes thinking about how unsustainable natural resources exploitation is a cause and a consequence of social conflict. Case studies profiled in the book demonstrate this cause and effect type situation, as well as innovative approaches for reducing risks to people and the environment. This text encourages readers to consider how humans behave in response to environmental risks and the various mechanisms that constitute effective and ineffective approaches to enforcement of wildlife crimes, including environmental and conservation policy. Case studies from the USA, Latin America, Africa, and Asia highlight corruption in conservation, global trade in electronic waste, illegal fishing, illegal logging, human-wildlife conflict, technology and space, water insecurity, wildlife disease, and wildlife poaching. Taken together, chapters expand the reader’s perspective and employ tools to understand and address environmental crimes and risks, and to provide novel empirical evidence for positive change. With established contributors providing interdisciplinary and global perspectives, this book establishes a foundation for the emerging field of conservation criminology.

Most ecological risk assessments consider the risk to individual organisms or organism-level attributes. From a management perspective, however, risks to population-level attributes and processes are often more relevant. Despite many published calls for population risk assessment and the abundance of available scientific research and technical tool

Sustainability is based on a simple and long-recognized factual premise: Everything that humans require for their survival and well-being depends, directly or indirectly, on the natural environment. The environment provides the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Recognizing the importance of sustainability to its work, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working to create programs and applications in a variety of areas to better incorporate sustainability into decision-making at the agency. To further strengthen the scientific basis for sustainability as it applies to human health and environmental protection, the EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to provide a framework for incorporating sustainability into the EPA's principles and decision-making. This framework, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA, provides recommendations for a sustainability approach that both incorporates and goes beyond an approach based on assessing and managing the risks posed by pollutants that has largely shaped environmental policy since the 1980s. Although risk-based methods have led to many successes and remain important tools, the report concludes that they are not adequate to address many of the complex problems that put current and future generations at risk, such as depletion of natural resources, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Moreover, sophisticated tools are increasingly available to address cross-cutting, complex, and challenging issues that go beyond risk management. The report recommends that EPA formally adopt as its sustainability paradigm the widely used "three pillars" approach, which means considering the environmental, social, and economic impacts of an action or decision. Health should be expressly included in the "social" pillar. EPA should also articulate its vision for sustainability and develop a set of sustainability principles that would underlie all agency policies and programs.

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.