Stakeholder engagement in environmental risk assessment
Citation:
Munns, W., H. Selck, AND A. Rea. Stakeholder engagement in environmental risk assessment. SETAC Europe 29th Annual Meeting, Helsinki, N/A, FINLAND, May 26 - 30, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Stakeholder engagement is critical to ensuring the transparency and objectivity of environmental risk assessments, and to promoting effective communication and understanding of assessment results. Although full engagement by stakeholders in all assessment activities might not be tractable, assessments will become more meaningful to environmental decision making as stakeholder involvement increases.
Description:
Active engagement with stakeholders can improve the value of risk assessments for environmental decision making by addressing three interrelated issues: transparency, objectivity, and communication. Stakeholders should be involved in risk assessments throughout the entire process―from assessment planning and problem formulation (including selection of protection goals and assessment endpoints) to risk communication―to help ensure that assessments are meaningful and informative to the environmental decisions that affect them. Acceptance of assessment results by stakeholders and decision makers depends in part on transparency in how a risk assessment is conducted, including its approaches, methods, assumptions, and uncertainties. Although full engagement by stakeholders in all assessment activities might not be possible or practical, assessments will become more transparent as stakeholder involvement increases. Stakeholders can serve as a check on the objectivity of risk assessments, helping to ensure that the methods employed (or in a worst case, special interests) do not bias results unintentionally or otherwise. They should be viewed as important sources of relevant knowledge about specific environmental systems and how people interact with them, and of the values people impute to those systems. Engagement of stakeholders throughout the process facilitates communication of risk assessment results and the rationale and expected benefits of management decisions based on them. Stakeholder engagement promotes clarity and understanding of the approaches taken during, the results obtained by, and the limitations of risk assessments, and should result in wider acceptance of this tool as valuable for informing environmental decisions.