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Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research & Development National Center for Environmental Assessment |
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Developing Management Objectives
(External Review Draft, June 2001)
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Planning for Ecological
Risk Assessment: Developing Management Objectives (External Review Draft, June 2001) (PDF file version 400K) |
- ABSTRACT:
- The Planning for Ecological Risk Assessment: Developing Management Objectives project will provide supplemental guidance to EPA's 1998 Guidelines for Ecological Risk Assessment. The topic was identified as one of high interest to EPA clients in a survey conducted by the Risk Assessment Forum after the Guidelines were released.
- Ecological risk assessment is a complex process that requires thoughtful planning: Planners must decide what species, ecosystems, or functions to protect. They must also consider species interactions and indirect effects; the significance of non-chemical stressors; and environmental laws implemented by other agencies, states, or local authorities. The guidance first discusses how to frame the decision context, and examines how to articulate the decision to be made and how to describe the fabric of public values; legal, regulatory, and institutional context; risk-management options, and the place and time in which the decision is framed. It also describes the typical players–risk managers, risk assessors, interested parties, and other analysts–and their roles, and suggests a process for reaching consensus.
- Once the decision context has been examined, management goals and objectives can be developed. To accomplish this, planners explore three questions: What do we want to protect? (how to identify important resources), What do we mean by "protect?" (stating goals specifically enough to take action), and What's really important, and how do we get there? (prioritizing, and separating ends from means). Objectives should be complete, compact, controllable, measurable, and understandable.
- When identifying information needs, planners are encouraged to think ahead about everything that will be needed to decide what to do about identified risks; ecological risk is part of the picture, but issues such as feasibility, practicability, cost, and acceptability also need to be factored into the decision. They should also consider who and what resources are available to perform the ecological risk assessment. The aim of this step is to narrow down which questions the risk assessment should address and identify those that will be addressed elsewhere.
- Although there is no longer a distinct boundary between planning and problem formulation, the two processes must be linked to set the stage for an informative ecological risk assessment. Management objectives are by definition closely related to the assessment endpoints evaluated in ecological risk assessment, and it should be possible to characterize them using the measures described in the Guidelines. There are many potential applications for this guidance in EPA and other environmental-management programs. Examples are used to illustrate how the principles might be used in several different settings.
