Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 228

statistical and other database information and models. Evaluation of the implemented
risk management/reduction, regulatory or technological measure is mainly based on
quantitative or qualitative environmental, social and economic information. This ret-
rospective evaluation may result in absolute values, for example, monetary benefits or
relative values compared with a reference or the target.
Environmental risk assessment (ERA) of chemicals, products, contaminated sites,
and technologies characterizes the type and scale of environmental and human health
risks associated with the identified hazards. Qualitative and/or quantitative tools can
be used for the assessment of environmental risk. Qualitative tools apply a relative
scale for ranking several similar environmental problems or cases (contaminants, prod-
ucts, contaminated sites) in order to focus the existing assessment and risk reduction
(RR) efforts on the most risky cases. Quantitative risk assessment tools give the abso-
lute risk value which, when compared with the acceptable risk value, determines
the risk characterization ratio ( RCR ) (how many times is the risk higher than the
acceptable level) (see Section 8.5.2 in this Volume), which may be proportional to the
urgency and/or necessary scale of RR. ERA is discussed in detail in Sections 4.1-4.7
in this Chapter and in Volume 2. The result of ERA is the basis of decision making
in the course of environmental risk management (ERM) of chemicals and contami-
nated sites, but it is not the only key factor; social and economic aspects are equally
important!
Life cycle assessment (LCA) of chemicals, products, and technologies is a sup-
plemental activity to ERA dealing with those impacts which endanger large regions
and the globe. These impacts include depletion of renewable and nonrenewable nat-
ural resources, cause imbalanced element cycles in the global ecosystem, greenhouse
effect and global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, deterioration and contamina-
tion of the atmosphere, the seas and oceans, and acidification, sodification, organic
matter depletion, sealing, compaction and desertification of soils. LCA of chemical
substances is introduced in Chapter 2.3, and the types of LCA are discussed in Chap-
ter 8. The details of LCA can be found in Sections 5.1-5.3 in this Chapter. The result
of LCA is expressed on a relative scale with comparable and aggregable values, but it
cannot be added to the results of a quantitative ERA expressed as an RCR or to the
quantified/monetized or non-quantified results of a socio-economic assessment.
Socio-Economic Impact Assessment (SEA) is an essential tool for the management
of chemicals and contaminated sites, as well as for the evaluation of various environ-
mental impacts of management measures. Social and economic impacts of chemicals,
products, contaminated sites and technologies should be evaluated in advance for deci-
sion making during the selection process of the best risk management option (RMO),
and also for verification purposes after the implementation of the measures. Verifi-
cation aims to quantify all economic aspects such as cost efficiency and the balance
between costs and benefits. We must note here that the same abbreviation of SEA for
Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment (see Chapter 8), is used as for the Socio-
Economic Assessment. Strategic environmental impact assessment is an infrequent,
integrative governmental-managerial tool supporting spatial development and plan-
ning, which includes social, economic and environmental aspects too. Socio-economic
assessment is the joint evaluation of economic and social impacts in addition to the
environmental considerations in ERM. It is applied for both the prospective and ret-
rospective evaluation of the options of environmental management and risk reduction