Environmental Risks

Takatorige, Toshio; Hirose, Yukio; Nagamatsu, Shingo

We will next discuss effective management of environmental risks from chemical substances. In 1997, the US Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management proposed a six-stage framework for risk management. The six stages involve defining the problem and putting it in context, analyzing the risks associated with the problem in context, examining options for addressing the risks, making decisions about which options to implement, taking actions to implement the decisions, and conducting an evaluation of the actions. Other countries often reference these processes in evaluating new environmental risk management methods. As methods and procedures of evaluating risks of chemical substances caught the attention, research advanced in finding a common scale for evaluating environmental risks of which chemical substances affect human health to what extents. Once the environmental risk of each chemical substance is evaluated, we can then identify risk management of which chemical substance to prioritize and to reduce the risk to what level.