Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management (also known as Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management) was a commission authorized as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to develop recommendations for how the United States Environmental Protection Agency would perform risk assessment as a part of developing air quality requlations.

The commission issued a report to the United States Congress in 1997 that "recommended a scheme for residual risk assessment as well as a framework for environmental health risk management." The framework recommended contained six components with the goal of the framework to provide an evaluation process "that instead of evaluating risks singly and in isolation from each other, they are evaluated in the context of the risk management decision to be made and in the context of public health."

The six components of the framework were:

• Problem/context
• Risks
• Options
• Decisions
• Actions
• Evaluation

These components of the framework act as a series of milestones as a part of the risk management process. Centered within this series of activities were the engagement of stakeholders, people who had some kind of an interest in the outcomes of the risk assessment and the measures put into place to manage the risk at an acceptable level.

(Sauer, 2003, pp 75) has this to say about the final report: In the end the Commission yielded to pressure from scientists and concluded that stakeholders "should not participate in the assessment itself" to avoid having risk assessments become "too politicized."

See also

• Public administration
• Safety standards

References

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