Environmental and Health Risk Assessment and Management : Principles and Practices

Paolo Ricci

ISBN 10: 9048169615 / ISBN 13: 9789048169610

Editore: Springer Netherlands, 2010

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Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - This textbook is about the law, economics, practical assessment, and the management of risky activities arising from routine, catastrophic environmental and occupational exposures to hazardous agents. The textbook begins where emission and exposure analysis end by providing estimates or predictions of deleterious exposures. Thus, we deal with determining the nature and form of relations between exposure and response, damage functions, and with the principles and methods used to determine the costs and benefits of risk management actions from the vantage point of single and multiple decision-makers. Today, national and international laws, conventions and protocols are increasingly concerned with reducing environmental and health risks through minimizing exposure to toxic substances, bacteria, viruses and other noxious agents. They do so through risk methods. The reason for the now worldwide use of risk assessment and management is that individuals and society must decide when, and at what cost, past and future hazardous conditions can either be avoided or minimized. In this process, society must account for the limited resources it can spend to remain sustainable. Risk-based methods play a pivotal role in identifying and ranking alternative, sustainable choices, while accounting for uncertainty and variability. Specifically, most reductions in risks require a balancing of the costs and benefits associated with the action to reduce exposure to a hazard and thus risk. This balancing necessarily involves linking exposure and response through causation. This essential aspect of risk assessment and management, if done incorrectly, can be costly to society.

Codice articolo 9789048169610

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Environmental and Health Risk Assessment and Management : Principles and Practices
• Editore: Springer Netherlands
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 9048169615
• ISBN 13: 9789048169610
• Rilegatura: Taschenbuch
• Condizione: Neu

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

This book is about the legal, economical, and practical assessment and management of risky activities arising from routine, catastrophic environmental and occupational exposures to hazardous agents. It includes a discussion of aspects of US and European Union law concerning risky activities, and then develops the economic analyses that are relevant to implementing choices within a supply and demand framework. The book also discusses exposure-response and time-series models used in assessing air and water pollution, as well as probabilistic cancer models, including toxicological compartmental, pharmaco-kinetic models and epidemiological relative risks and odds ratios-based models. Statistical methods to measure agreement, correlation and discordance are also developed. The methods and criteria of decision-analysis, including several measures of value of information (VOI) conclude the expositions. This book is an excellent text for students studying risk assessment and management.

Dalla quarta di copertina

This book is about the legal, economical, and practical assessment and management of risky activities arising from routine, catastrophic environmental and occupational exposures to hazardous agents. It begins where emission and exposure analysis ends by providing estimates or predictions of deleterious exposures. The book covers the essential aspects of environmental and health law, environmental economics, applied statistical and probabilistic methods, fundamental notions of applied epidemiology and toxicology, as well as decision analysis, to provide an integrated overview of how risk assessment and management combine to produce sound societal outcomes. Risk-based methods play a pivotal role in identifying and ranking alternative, sustainable choices, while accounting for uncertainty and variability. Specifically, most reductions in risks require a balancing of the costs and benefits associated with the action to reduce exposure to a hazard and thus risk. This balancing necessarily involves linking exposure and response through causation. Fundamentally, in risk assessment and management, science and law intersect through legal and scientific causation to the point that the failure to provide a sound causal argument can make an otherwise beneficial law or regulation invalid.

The contents of the book have been written with the student s need in mind: practice, applications and integration take precedence over theory, accomplishing these functions with unparalleled breadth and depth, to provide the methods and criteria for sound decision-making of risk or uncertainty. In addition, each chapter concludes with sample questions to illustrate concepts.