Environmental Analysis Tools - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 262

resulting from environmental stresses. The tool was developed in response to
contamination of water, soil, air, and other media from hazardous waste and
other uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals and grew out of the regulatory
mandates in the United States to address hazardous waste cleanup, specifically:

r Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act (CERCLA) or the Superfund law (42 U.S.C. §9601 et seq. 1980)
r Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986, which
amended and updated CERCLA
r National Contingency Plan (40 CFR 300)

As the investigation and cleanup of hazardous waste sites progressed in
response to the new legislation and regulations, new tools were needed for
the task. One of these tools was ecological risk assessment, which grew from
the roots of environmental impact analysis and human health risk assess-
ment. It has proven effective and efficient in defining the need, extent, and
approaches for cleanup of contaminated sites, and the methods have been
refined and enhanced since the introduction of the tool in the late 1980s. It has
matured and there has been some limited adaptation of ecological risk assess-
ment to environmental impact analysis in cases where the primary resources
potentially impacted are ecological. The history leading up to the development
of the risk analysis tool is presented in this chapter, followed by a summary
of the tool, a case study where ecological risk assessment was successfully
applied in the EIS for development of an Alaska gold mine, and a discussion
of the relationship between ecological risk assessment and environmental
analysis.
The presentation of ecological risk assessment in this topic is not a comprehen-
sive description of the tool. There are many references, as cited in this chapter,
that present all the details necessary to conduct a risk assessment. The objec-
tives of the risk assessment discussion presented here are to give environmen-
tal impact analysis practitioners an appreciation of what can be accomplished
with the tool, provide an overview of the process, and encourage practitioners to
adapt ecological risk assessment procedures to other environmental resources.

7.2.1 History and Development

Ecological risk assessment was not initially used or even available as a
component of the first hazardous waste site or contaminant release evalu-
ations. In the early years of hazardous waste awareness (most of the 1980s)
ecological resources were of little concern because the environmentally
aware public and regulators were narrowly focused on risk to humans and
human health. This focus was fully justified by the real threat to human
life and health, driven by the sudden awareness of Love Canal and similar