Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 390

OECD (2007) explored the links between environmental innovation and glob-
alization. The main output of this project is a report, Environmental Innovation
and Global Markets (OECD, 2008), and a workshop organized on the global mar-
ket entry of environmental technologies. The report focuses on the importance of
upgrading the companies' environmental strategy to the upcoming global requirements
and the responsibility of the government in supporting environmental innovation.
Machnig (2007), State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry for the Environ-
ment, characterized the international situation as “the gold mine of environmental and
energy technology markets world-wide''. He estimated environmental technologies and
innovations as a

1,000 billion market, which is likely to double by 2020.
Europe's performance in research and innovation lags behind that of the US and
Japan, and China, Brazil and India are rapidly catching up. To reverse the current trend,
the Europe 2020 Strategy sets a target of raising spending on R&D to 3% of gross
domestic product (GDP) by 2020 (EU, 2013). The EU plans to closely harmonize the
activities of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP 7, 2013), the innovation part of
the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP, 2013), including the
Programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium Enterprises
(COSME, 2014-2020) and the activities of the European Institute for Innovation and
Technology (EIT, 2013).

a

5 INNOVATIVE CONCEPTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL
RISK MANAGEMENT

Not only the environmental assessment, monitoring and risk reduction methods and
technologies, but also innovative concepts may increase the efficiency of environmental
management.

5.1 More than risk-based environmental management
Hazard and risk assessment, which is still intensively developing, has been a great step
toward establishing a quantitative measure to characterize environmental risk and
serve as an objective basis for decision making. The quantitative risk value enables
the decision maker to choose between management concepts, take into account this
fairly objective value in prevention, planning, early warning and monitoring, in con-
taminated site assessment as well as in the reduction of risk and determination of the
target risk or target concentration. This objective measure of risk supports ranking and
optimizing environmental management. Thus limited funds can be spent on the most
critical high-risk cases to achieve maximal environmental and economic efficiency.
By practicing risk-based environmental management and decision making, one will
realize that risks within human scope cannot be reduced completely because time and
funds are generally not available to fulfill a “no risk'' situation, but only an “accept-
able'' risk level. This acceptable level of risk differs from time to time, from country
to country and region to region, depending on the risk-benefit balance of the area
in question. Workers accept relatively high risks for having a job, regions accept the
environmental and occupational risk of mining and heavy industries for economic
development, starving countries accept high risk of pesticides in return to food, etc.