“Solution-Focused Risk Assessment”: A Proposal for the Fusion of Environmental Analysis and Action

ABSTRACT

For 30 years, more attention and resources have been expended on dissecting problems (risk assessment) than on evaluating actual solutions that reduce risks. The basic dogma holds that risk assessment must precede risk management. But there is an opposite and perhaps better way: the opening question should not be “How bad is the problem?” but “How good are the solutions we might apply to the problem?” Rethinking risk assessment in this context offers three classes of benefits over the status quo. First, it can help break the endless cycle of analysis: when the goal is to know enough to decide, rather than to know everything, natural stopping points emerge. Second, it can lead to more decisions that actually achieve risk reduction, rather than pronouncements about how much risk reduction would be optimal. Third, it can highlight ways to resolve multiple risks simultaneously, avoid needless and tragic risk-risk tradeoffs, and involve affected stakeholders in debating what should be done. Arguably, the longer the disembodied analysis of risk information is allowed to proceed, the more likely it is that the “problem” will be defined in a way that blunts the free-wheeling discussion of solutions, to the detriment of human health, the environment, and the economy.

Key Words:

• risk management
• standard-setting
• decision theory
• public involvement
• technology options

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the research assistance provided by Alison Bonelli, the many informative conversations I had with members of the NRC Science and Decisions committee during 2006–2008, especially Greg Paoli, the helpful comments of John Graham and of three anonymous reviewers, and the detailed review provided by Peter Chapman. I also thank Michael Callahan of USEPA for his presentation to the Science and Decisions committee in February 2007, in which he introduced us to the concept of the “ideal final result.” This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0756539 (Human and Social Dynamics Program).

Notes

Much has been written (see especially the entire special issue in August 2003 of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment) about whether the current conception of the desired risk assessment/risk management relationship actually originated with the Red Book committee, or arose through extrapolation beyond what the “mis-Read” book actually said. Through discussions with many of the original committee members (and through service on the two National Research Council panels convened circa 1994 and 2006 to re-examine these issues), I have come to believe that the Red Book committee did not oppose the notion of a symbiotic and iterative relationship between risk managers and risk assessors, so long as the functions were kept “conceptually separate.” However, by concentrating on the landmark four-step process map for how risk assessment could best be carried out—and by omitting any detail about what kinds of questions assessors should be pursuing—the Red Book did contribute greatly to the impression that risk assessment should “pass the baton” to risk management, rather than vice versa.

I will return to the toxic air pollutants example in the section “Echoes of SFRA in Familiar Places,” as I recognize that here the U.S. Congress in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 also established a technology-based process to precede the residual risk phase that USEPA is now undertaking.

Note that because OSHA generally sets one limit for a substance across all industries, there is no attempt to consider whether the PEL requires “best available technology” to achieve—only that in one or more sub-sectors the PEL could be set no lower without going beyond what is economically palatable.

In a recent presentation (Finkel 2007), I argued that many of the most publicized “tradeoffs” were in fact either concocted by the regulated industry to deter agency action (and were never plausible responses to the regulation), or should have more properly been interpreted as “wake-up calls” to find cost-effective ways to control both the primary and the offsetting risk. Nevertheless, I believe that many legitimate tradeoffs do exist and should be accounted for in policy (see ‘A Specific Example' below).

Note that considering several real solutions is not the same as the practice (common at OSHA, and not uncommon at USEPA) of analyzing multiple abstract goals, such as “the desired exposure concentration along with half and twice that concentration.” For example, the 2006 NAAQS for fine particles proposed three “decisions”—the current baseline, a new annual average limit of 15 μg/m³, and a stricter limit of 14 μg/m³ that USEPA eventually rejected. I hope it goes without saying that this is not “evaluating solutions,” but “trying out numbers.” The optimal solution may turn out to be closer to one of these permutations than it is to the initial pronouncement, but that will only occur by coincidence, not because getting to “half the original proposed limit” is a well-specified means to an end.

Some signs now point to an interesting watershed in the policy uses of CRA. Part of the original impetus for CRA was to focus more attention on small increments of exposure from anthropogenic sources when they are found to add to a background exposure (to the same substance) that already puts some people near or above adverse-effect (or significant-risk) levels. However, one could instead view these incremental exposures as less of a priority if consumer or lifestyle choices can make a bigger dent in the background. For example, a recent USEPA report on perchlorate in the environment concluded that providing supplemental iodide might be more effective in improving thyroid health than environmental controls on perchlorate emissions or cleanup of existing sources (Renner 2010). SFRA facilitates this latter way of looking at cumulative risk situations, without suggesting that “victim-level” measures should ever be preferred to source-level ones.

For a representative reaction to this “user-friendly” performance orientation, consider the floor statement of then-Senator Tim Hutchinson (R-AR), urging his colleagues to strike down the ergonomics regulation: “The rule is replete with vague and subjective requirements where employers must have an ergonomics plan in place to deal with such hazards. OSHA said it is being flexible by allowing employers to design a plan that caters to their own workplace, but that same ‘flexibility’ also requires the employer to be an expert on ergonomic injuries.”

Ruckelshaus convened a series of public meetings in the neighborhood around a highly polluting copper smelter near the city of Tacoma, Washington, so that USEPA and the affected public could “determine together what is an acceptable risk from arsenic emissions” (Lipshitz and Mann 2005). The smelter closed down due to declining global copper prices before the discussions were complete, but reportedly much progress was made toward a common understanding of the risks of the status quo and the costs of emission reductions.

An op-ed (Morris 2007) tackled the safe drinking water problem from a novel solution-focused perspective: the author suggested that drinking water could be made even safer via the installation of point-of-use filters on household taps used for drinking and cooking water, while taps used for laundry and toilet water could instead meet a slightly relaxed set of contaminant levels. This idea sprang from the question “how can we provide water safe enough for its intended use?” not from “what is the acceptably safe concentration of each substance in household water?”

This is a highly plausible scenario—for example, after OSHA's MC regulation was promulgated in 1997, manufacturers began aggressively touting an unregulated substitute (1-bromopropane), despite its known neurotoxic properties and close structural relationship to several animal carcinogens (Majersik et al. 2007). The brominated material has caused neurological damage when used as a substitute for perchloroethylene in dry cleaning (CDC 2008), and has emerged from the testing process as a potent animal carcinogen (NTP 2009).

Similarly, defining the medical problem in the second entry of Table 1 as “uncomfortable pants” would foreclose thinking about diet and exercise (bigger pants being a cheap and effective solution to this problem so defined).