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Quantitative Assessment of Cumulative Impacts: Challenges and Progress

Quantitative Assessment of Cumulative Impacts: Challenges and Progress. Lauren Zeise Cal/EPA Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment CAPCOA Workshop: Health Impact of Air Pollution on Communities September 19, 2007 Carson, California.

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Quantitative Assessment of Cumulative Impacts: Challenges and Progress

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  1. Quantitative Assessment of Cumulative Impacts:Challenges and Progress Lauren Zeise Cal/EPA Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment CAPCOA Workshop: Health Impact of Air Pollution on Communities September 19, 2007 Carson, California

  2. Quantitative CI Assessment:Challenges and Progress • “Problem Formulation” • What’s being decided? • What are the questions? • Science • What we know • What we don’t know • Analytical tools • Practice • Who assesses • How assessment is done • What’s assessed • Who uses it and how do they

  3. Challenges

  4. #1: Problem FormulationWhat question does the CIA address? • What can be done to insure risk doesn’t increase when an new facility is introduced? • Is the environmental risk load for the community too large? • How is the community impacted?

  5. The Great Separation Risk Assessment Risk Management Unclear how to dialog to get to right questions, analyses and decisions for the community

  6. #2: ScienceList Driven Assessments • Toxic Hot Spot (AB2588), Toxic Air Contaminants, Criteria Air Pollutants • No endpoint specific test, no value, no risk • Not listed, no risk • No exposure estimate, no risk estimate • Long listing process, high evidence threshold for some lists

  7. Data Gaps “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein • Source Gaps • Exposure Gaps • Toxicity Gaps • Cumulative Effects Gaps

  8. Scientific Knowledge Gap Still limited understanding about • How most chemicals cause human disease • How chemicals interact with each other and other factors (e.g., SES) to cause disease

  9. Science: Limited confidence in risk attributions from environmental causes for most community diseases

  10. #3: Practice • Typical Risk Assessment • Chemical-by-chemical • Media-by-media • Source-by-source • Most community characteristics not considered • Typical Regulatory Approach • Each authority considers source-by-source projects or facilities within its mandates and jurisdiction • No integration across jurisdictions

  11. Progress Along long and near term trajectories

  12. #1: Asking the right questions • NAS 1996 Understanding Risk:Stakeholder involvement in early and all stages of assessment • Decision/assessment schemes have moved toward this approach (e.g., US EPA) • Cal/EPA dialog with California Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (“CEJAC”)

  13. Cumulative Impacts & Environmental Justice in California “Cumulative impacts means exposures, public health or environmental effects from the combined emissions and discharges in a geographic area, including environmental pollution from all sources, whether single or multi-media, routinely, accidentally or otherwise released. Impacts will take into account sensitive populations and socio-economic factors, where applicable and to the extent data are available.” Cal/EPA, Feb. 2005

  14. #2: Science Initiatives and Developments • Developing high throughput approaches to capture early markers of toxicity • National Academies 2007 Toxicity Testing • NTP Roadmap • EPA ToxCast • Upstream approaches • enable greater numbers of chemicals to be assessed • provide scientific basis for precautionary approaches NAS 2007

  15. Background Biological Exposure Vulnerability Age, genetics, health disease status Interactions with SES and other community factors Recognition of Impacts of Background and Vulnerability on Risk

  16. California Environmental Chemical Biomonitoring Program • SB 1379 (Perata-Ortiz) signed into law September 2006 • Planning $$ in Governors 2007-2008 budget • Program to measures baseline levels of environmental chemicals in Californians • Will serve as a point of comparison for community exposures • Near term, data can help predict cumulative exposure and risk • Long term, markers of effect may help measure cumulative health impacts

  17. Additional Areas of Scientific Progress (types of things discussed at this CAPCOA meeting) • Tools readily used by non-experts under development • More technically complex CI analytical tools being developed • Disease and exposures tracking and monitoring • Continuing epidemiological developments exploring and confirming community disease and environmental exposure relationships

  18. #3: Practice at Cal/EPA • Initiated: Development of Cal/EPA Framework for Cumulative Impact Assessment • Research and technical assistance from UC • Formation of a Cumulative Impacts and Precautionary Approaches Workgroup

  19. Cumulative Impacts and Precautionary Approaches Workgroup to advise on: • Proposed Cumulative Impact (CI) and Precautionary Assessment Frameworks • Tools for CI • Opportunities for use of CI assessment in decision-making • Implementation, including proposals for policy, regulatory and statutory changes

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