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A SIX CASES IN RISK ANALYSES AND CHARACTERIZATION
Pages 167-198

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From page 167...
... The cases are presented in the order in which they are mentioned above: ecosystem management in South Florida, incineration siting in Ohio, regulatory negotiation for a disinfectant by-products rule, siting a power plant in Florida, the California Comparative Risk Project, and future land use for a former nuclear waste site. APPLICATION OF ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA The US Man and the Biosphere Program (US MAB)
From page 168...
... The project is interesting in terms of risk characterization for several reasons. One is its strong emphasis on problem formulation: the project appears to have changed the dialogue on the future of the South Florida environment by redefining the issues into an ecosystem management framework.
From page 170...
... and identify other humancaused stresses; to examine the societal and institutional factors influencing ecological sustainability; and to assess the compatibility of ecosystem management with societal policies and institutions and the ability of these policies and institutions to achieve ecological sustainability goals. And it would require deliberation to identify the concerns of the region's interested and affected parties and the social and economic outcomes or endpoints that the project's analyses would have to address.
From page 171...
... These were made initially to drain land for agriculture and human settlements, and somewhat later to protect against flooding (Light and Dineen, 1994~. The resultant Central and South Florida Project of the U.S.
From page 172...
... logical endpoints are defined as the ecological characteristics across a range of hierarchy (population, community, ecosystem, and landscape levels) that can be used to evaluate the health or change-of-health of the ecosystem;
From page 173...
... The study presumed that sustainability for the South Florida regional ecosystem would require the reestablishment of enough of the natural hydrological system to provide water quantity, timing, and distribution over a sufficiently large area to support the ecological components, such as wading birds and the mosaic of habitats, that constitute the essence and uniqueness of the Everglades (Harwell et al., in press)
From page 174...
... All scenarios presumed flood protection and other support required for the human-occupied zone. It was concluded that Scenarios A and B contain insufficient spatial extent of the core area to provide for the defining characteristics of the Everglades at population to landscape levels or contain insufficient buffer area in order to provide for hydrological storage and release similar to natural hydrological cycles.
From page 175...
... Furthermore, sugar agriculture is much preferable to the alternative of housing developments in terms of the impact on the Everglades system downstream. Further detailed analyses remain to be done, but the risk characterization using an ecosystem management framework in the US MAB project has now suggested that a solution may be feasible that achieves ecological sustainability of the regional ecosystem and is consistent with the economic, cultural, and other societal sustainability goals for the agricultural community of the region.
From page 176...
... The key result of the analysis and deliberation was a set of scenarios and consequence analyses that essentially characterized the risks and other outcomes of various plausible management strategies and served as input from the program to the decision participants. The adaptive management framework, as applied in South Florida, faces limitations involving such issues as data needs, the potential for adversarial processes to interfere or derail the process, the perception that it is controlled by elites, and the time required for adequate development of the interdisciplinary research team.
From page 177...
... Beyond this, some people believe that approving the operation of any hazardous waste management technology provides an incentive for continued production and distribution of chlorinated or other potentially hazardous compounds. These systematic concerns ebb and flow into any local debate over incineration, but they are often pushed off the screen in formal risk assessment and risk characterizations for a proposed project.
From page 178...
... In particular, they have argued that the assessment of risks to a population due to a single source cannot be conducted absent the context of other risks imposed on that population and that particular subgroups within the population may be subjected to an especially high combination of exposures with implications for both health risk calculations and environmental equity concerns. These issues are often raised as part of the broader agenda of environmental groups in debates over hazardous waste facilities.
From page 179...
... Assuming the results of the current risk assessments are representative and correct, the facility could provide a safe, effective, and economically beneficial mechanism for hazardous waste management. It is clear, however, that the concerns of all participants have not as yet been addressed by these assessments, and for many, the full dimensions of risk from the WTI facility have yet to be characterized.
From page 180...
... Regulatory negotiation offered a way to bring would-be adversaries together, to give them a chance to speak with each other, to work with EPA to devise a proposed rule, and to give all parties involved a chance to recognize that the conflict over drinking water regulation was not likely to be won by any single party, but, instead, might be resolved by coopera tion and compromise. In September 1992 EPA announced its intention to organize a regulatory negotiation rule-making process to develop a DBP rule.
From page 181...
... The TWG provided a formal opportunity for chemical and equipment suppliers who had not been named to the negotiating committee to contribute input to the negotiations, while also supplying much-needed information about the cost and performance of drinking water treatment technologies. In addition, EPA arranged for three experts to provide ongoing scientific advice and technical support for those members of the negotiating committee whose organizations were not able to provide this kind of expertise.
From page 182...
... The negotiating committee was not free to define the problem as it wished because it was constrained by law. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires that contaminants be regulated with maximum concentration levels.
From page 183...
... In fact, the committee pursued several alternatives that seemed to run contrary to the letter of the law. For example, the committee asserted that DBP rulemaking should be consistent with other rules, and it proposed a new enhanced surface water treatment rule as well as the DBP rule.
From page 184...
... At times, members of the committee were assigned to work with the TWG in these analyses. At the third negotiating session, the committee asked the TWG to develop information on the distribution of source water characteristics across the nation.
From page 185...
... A pollution prevention approach involved reducing the entry of DBP precursors into the water treatment system or removing them before the disinfectant was added. In order to investigate the hypothesis that precursor treatment could provide adequate risk protection, the committee asked the TWG to analyze the effect of precursor content on DBP levels in treated water.
From page 186...
... Deliberation was integrated with analysis through requests to and reports from a technical advisory committee. The DBP regulatory negotiation was a success in the sense that it resulted in the publication of three proposed rules, including the DBP rule, that are in the process of final review.
From page 187...
... As of early 1996, the small water suppliers had not commented on the proposed rules or challenged them in court. The disinfectant by-products regulatory negotiation provides an example of how analysis and deliberation can be coordinated in making risk decisions.
From page 188...
... The EAG had clear and specific influence in the site selection process, and licensing is under way without opposition at the selected site. Multiattribute Utility Analysis Multiattribute utility analysis is a technique for formally drawing multiple perspectives and evaluations into a decision making process.
From page 189...
... Multiattribute utility analysis requires coordination between deliberation and analysis at two levels. First, the computation of scores, an analytic procedure, follows deliberation in which values are elicited, discussed, peer-tested, and revised.
From page 190...
... Based on argument given by the EAG, the FPC group decided to prefer sites that were already near a disturbed area, and they added this new criterion to their list. The FPC group then increased weighting on several other criteria (effects on county tax base, disturbed areas, sensitive land uses, surface water, and terrestrial communities)
From page 191...
... APPENDIX A TABLE A-1 Criteria and Weighting for Power Plant Site Selection 191 FPC Initial EAG FPC Final CriteriaWeight Weight Weight Impact on Surface Water Quality11 15 19 Wetlands Disruption54 15 14 Proximity to Disturbed Areasnot used 19 11 Proximity to Sensitive Terrestrial Communities6 15 11 Proximity to Sensitive Land Uses6 15 11 Proximity to Class I Air Quality Areas10 12 11 Impact on County Tax Base3 10 11 Proximity to Urbanized Areas6 0 11 Existing Air Sources6 0 0 Total102 101 99 the EAG weights. On only one criterion, proximity to urbanized area, did the FPC group's weighting grow further apart from the EAG's.
From page 192...
... A three-point scale was developed for rating potential for broader purpose. The EAG also recognized that a power plant could be a large burden on the infrastructure of a remote area.
From page 193...
... People directed their concerns toward the goal of improving the collective value tree. In the FPC case, multiattribute utility analysis techniques helped incorporate multiple concerns into the site-selection decision and resulted in a transparent decision-making process that has acquired a high degree of public acceptance.
From page 194...
... This was evident in both the way the problem was formulated and the fact that the CCRP was willing to modify its process design as a result of deliberation about whether it would produce the needed information. The initial process design developed by the California EPA as a result of its diagnosis of the situation called for three technical committees on human health, ecological health, and social welfare- to work independently to rank risks in their categories, while three other committees would consider management options and the legal and economic constraints associated with making those choices (California Environmental Protection Agency, 1992~.
From page 195...
... Despite this immediate outcome in state politics and the fact that the project did not fulfill all of its own objectives, the project is instructive because it brought together conventional forms of risk analysis with analysis and deliberation about various social, economic, equity, and other concerns. It demonstrates the importance of iteration in process design, particularly the use of deliberation to revisit the provisional problem formulation and the process design that emerged from the diagnostic phase, and the links between process design and problem formulation.
From page 196...
... Risk assessments are likely to be part of any EIS concerning a hazardous waste site, and the scoping process is a way of ensuring that the policy options and possible harms addressed in the assessments are consistent with the needs of the decision makers and affected parties. DOE, in collaboration with EPA, the Oregon and Washington state governments, and county and tribal governments of the region composed a list of potential participants for the Hanford Future Site Use Working Group, including both public officials and interested and affected parties, to advise on the EIS (Hanford Future Sites Working Group, 1992~.
From page 197...
... It also decided to make all decisions by consensus. A significant feature of the Hanford Future Site Uses Working Group was that the participants identified the information they needed.
From page 198...
... Cleanup levels were delineated according to access restrictions, which would be based on health risk assessments. This case illustrates how a risk decision-making process can use techniques for deliberation and public review in combination with analysis to arrive at a widely acceptable formulation of the problem and to design a process that is likely to characterize risks in a way that meets the needs of the interested and affected parties and public officials.


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