Riskiness assessment

Insurance and Ri In the venture-premium method of assessment, risky investments are required to yield a rate of return that adds a premium to the cost of finance. D. F. Rudd and C. C. Watson (The Strategy of Process Engineering, Wiley, New York, 1968, p. 91) consider this relationship ... 

The main objection to the venture-premium method is that the assessment of the riskiness of a project may be too subjective. This could lead to the rejec tion of potentially attractive proposals and the acceptance of projects that merely appear to be risk-free. 

The outputs provided by the model can be used to perform a risk assessment if they are compared with reference limit values and literature data in order to determine whether the situation is risky or not. The values obtained by USEtox and used for the characterization of the risk in China are presented in the following tables. Table 4 presents the values for the concentration into the environmental compartments of the concerning additives (Pb and DeBDE). 

As regards complex mixtures, the Dutch group initially recommended a two-step approach (see Figure 10.5) first to identify the n (e.g., 10) most risky chemicals in the mixture, and then to perform hazard identification and risk assessment of the defined mixture of the (10) priority chemicals using procedures appropriate for simple, defined mixtures (Feron et al. 1995a,b, 1998 Cassee et al. 1998. 

However, in that combination study there is the potential risk of having effects on fertility in one or both sexes that would limit the number of litters available for evaluation of fetal morphology. The need to assess two species in the EFD study, to access both sexes in the fertility study, and the complexities of the PPN study make the three-study option the most practical and least risky. 

In Chapter 7 I will examine how risk assessment of chemicals is carried out. In this chapter I take a closer look at the concept of risk as it is used both in technical risk assessments and in everyday life. I suggest that rather than trying to assess the risks of a technology we should ask how risky the technology is. Riskiness is a way to think about the uncertain threat that the precautionary principle refers to. I also discuss the importance of the context of the risky situation in risk evaluation and attitudes to risks. 

Deciding to take a risk puts us, and perhaps others, in a risky situation. This situation may or may not afford opportunities to act so as to avoid harmful outcomes. Our attitude to a risky situation in which there are such opportunities will depend on our assessment of our abilities to avoid the harm. If people are successful at avoiding harm in risky situations, then the risks (the harm that actually results) may be low. However, the inherent riskiness of the situation has not been reduced. The fact that certain activities have been made more risky than they were, and perhaps therefore have to be avoided, is a restriction of people s freedom of action in the world. This restriction is caused by human action and is therefore of moral and political concern. 

Risk is a complex, multi-dimensional concept. Evidence from social research on attitudes to risk suggest that in assessing a risk, people (including experts) tend to run all the different factors together the expected benefits as well as the harms who takes the decisions what is put at risk whether they have any agency in the risky situation to avoid the possible harm whether the harm is something that can be remedied or coped with. 

In the next chapter I will look at how risks from chemicals are assessed. Do the current methods of assessment succeed in estimating risks as the probability of harm I suggest that rather than trying to estimate risks we should assess how risky a chemical is. 

In the second part of this chapter I discuss attributes of chemicals that contribute to their riskiness. In Chapter 101 address how such assessments of riskiness could be used in regulation. 

In Chapter 6 I suggested that when assessing technologies we should ask how risky they are, where the riskiness of a technology is the possibility of it causing harm. 

In assessing the riskiness of a chemical it would not be important to estimate exposures to the chemical, since unlike risks (the probability of harm being caused by it), how risky a chemical is does not depend on the amount people are exposed to. Risks can be reduced by strategies that reduce exposure (such as not eating food from contaminated environments), but these do not change the capacity of the chemical to cause harm, and thus its riskiness. 

In the following I make suggestions for how we should assess this capacity to cause harm. I then discuss three other features of synthetic chemicals — novelty, persistence and mobility - that have a bearing on how reliable we should consider our knowledge about a chemical to be and the degree of reliability that we should seek. In Chapter 10 1 discuss how assessments of riskiness could function in regimes for regulation of chemicals. 

The importance of the processes set in motion by a novel chemical suggests that when assessing how risky a particular novel chemical is we should think about how it will degrade, interact with other molecules, and fit into natural processes... 

Persistence and the related property of bioaccumulation were not previously considered in risk assessments under EU legislation, but do have to be considered in CSAs carried out under REACH. Persistence and bioaccumulation do not in themselves denote adverse effects, so a chemical cannot be said to pose a risk simply by virtue of it having these properties. However, persistence and bioaccumulation of organic chemicals render those chemicals more risky in that they increase the magnitude of harmful effects, if any are caused. 

Instead of assessing risk, I suggest that we should try to assess riskiness in the everyday sense of this term, where it refers to the epistemic possibility of harm, not merely probabilities of identified types of harm. Whereas risk relates to outcomes, riskiness is a property of a thing, situation or activity and is relative to our knowledge about it. I suggest that what are normally termed precautionary approaches are concerned with riskiness, rather than just risk they are concerned with whether, for all we know, there is a possibility of harm, not just with the probabilities of known, specifiable types of harm. 

In Chapter 10 1 consider how assessments of chemicals for their riskiness could fit into a regulatory system. But first I turn to the ethical and political presuppositions of risk-based regulatory systems. Why is there such an insistence that regulation be risk-based ... 

We are perhaps more likely to avoid new problems if, when assessing novel technologies, we consider not just what we know about their effects, but the extent to which we are ignorant or uncertain about what those effects will be. We should consider the riskiness, not just the currently known risks, of new technologies. 

---