ENVIRONMENTAL RISK ASSESSMENT

Environmental risk is characterized as deviation from generally accepted principles and standards of treatment of natural environment by communities, business entities, society, and state, as well as from standards of the resulting social relations among them.

Today’s society strives to gradually transform the damage-based approaches into the risk-based ones – both qualitative and quantitative aspect assessment and forecast of possible deviations.

"The same acid is only a risk to human health if humans are exposed to it. The degree of harm caused by the exposure will depend on the specific exposure scenario. If a human only comes into contact with the acid after it has been heavily diluted, the risk of harm will be minimal but the hazardous property of the chemical will remain unchanged”, says Robyn Fairman from Monitoring and Assessment Research Centre in London.

Why is environmental risk assessment important today?

Environmental risks are defined in accordance with state requirements, industry standards, good practice examples, and as “Damage-Cost-Benefit” analysis.

Therefore, risk assessment became instrumental in decision making during technical and economic analysis.