Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
15.6.3 Outline of ERA in Other Countries
The United Kingdom has developed a framework for ERA (Weeks and Comber
2005 ; Weeks et al. 2004 ). A cornerstone in this framework is the connection to
the statutory regime for identification and control of sites potentially affected by
contamination, also known as Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act of 1990.
This act defines a site as contaminated if:
a contaminant source and a pathway along which the contaminant can move is
present and the contaminant (potentially) can affect a specified receptor;
there is a significant possibility of significant harm;
contamination of controlled waters is occurring or is likely to occur.
Currently, only ecological risks to controlled waters and certain protected habi-
tats (defined in Part IIA) are covered. The framework, however, does address how
to perform ERA at sites not currently covered by Part IIA. The UK framework is
based on schemes found in e.g. USA, Canada and the Netherlands. Like the pro-
cedures in these countries, it is a based on a tiered approach, where the initial tier
zero aims to determine whether or not a site belongs under the Part IIA of the leg-
islation. It involves the development of a Conceptual Site Model, which describes
what is already (historically) known about the site, e.g. whether there is a likely
source-pathway-receptor linkage.
In many other countries of the EU, for example Germany, Spain and Sweden,
ERA can be based on additional types of testing, making a Triad approach frame-
work feasible. A decision support system for assisting in site-specific ERA was
developed based on research at the Acna di Cengio 'mega site' in the Bormida
valley, Italy (Critto et al. 2007 ; Semenzin et al. 2007 , 2008 , 2009a, b ).
The US and Canada were among the first in producing general frameworks for
ERA (CCME 1996 ;US-EPA 1998 ). Later many amendments to the first publica-
tions were produced and these are available via the respective websites. 1 Both US
and Canada frameworks for ERA address many questions related to relatively large
contaminated areas, whereas some European approaches typically are designed to
cope with many but smaller sites. Furthermore, wild life is a more important issue
in the North America frameworks compared to the European. The reason for the
somewhat reversed development of ERA in the two regions might be due to the fact
that Soil Quality Standards were first developed in Europe, while general frame-
works were first developed in North America. Nowadays the basic outlines of the
various ERA frameworks and derivation of Soil Quality Standards world-wide seem
to converge (Swartjes et al. 2008 ).
1 http://www.epa.gov/riskassessment/ecological-risk.htm ; http://www.ccme.ca/ourwork/soil.html
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