Risk Assessment Oil and Gas
Risk Control and Management Phase
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| 3.4.6. Risk Control and Management Phase After the risk assessment is completed, risk managers may consider whether additional follow-up activities are required. Depending on the importance of the assessment, confidence in the assessment results, and available resources, it may be advisable to conduct another iteration of the assessment in order to facilitate a final management decision. Ecological risk assessments are frequently designed in sequential tiers that proceed from simple, relatively inexpensive evaluations to more costly and complex assessments. Initial tiers are based on conservative assumptions, such as maximum exposure and ecological sensitivity. When an early tier cannot sufficiently define risk to support a management decision, a higher tier that may require either additional data or applying more refined analysis techniques to available data may be needed. Higher tiers provide more ecologically realistic assessments while making less conservative assumptions about exposure and effects. Another option is to proceed with a management decision based on the risk assessment and develop a monitoring plan to evaluate the results of the decision. For example, if the decision was to mitigate risks through exposure reduction, monitoring could help determine whether the desired reduction in exposure (and effects) was achieved. Monitoring is also critical for deter- mining the extent and nature of any ecological recovery that may be occurring or for detecting risk exceedances that merit early intervention. Experience obtained by using focused monitoring results to evaluate risk assessment predictions can help improve the risk assessment process and is encouraged. Communicating ecological risks to the public is usually the responsibility of risk managers. Although the final risk assessment document (including its risk characterization sections) can be made available to the public, the risk communication process is best served by tailoring the style 25 of communication to a particular audience. It is important to clearly describe the ecological resources at risk, their value, and the costs of protecting (and failing to protect) the resources (U.S. EPA, 1995). The degree of confidence in the risk assessment and the rationale for risk management decisions and options for reducing risk are also important. Management goals for a risk assessment are established by risk managers but are derived in a variety of ways. Significant interactions among a variety of interested parties are required to generate agreed-on management goals for the resource. Public meetings, constituency group meetings, evaluation of resource management organization charters, and other means of looking for management goals may be necessary. Diverse risk management teams may elect to use social scientists trained in consensus-building methods. Even though management goals derived in this way may require further definition, there is increased confidence that these goals are supported by the audience for the risk assessment. Regardless of how management goals are established, goals that explicitly define which ecological values are to be protected are more easily used to design a risk assessment for decision making than general management goals. Whenever goals are general, risk assessors must interpret them into ecological values that can be measured or estimated and ensure that the managers agree with their interpretation. Risk assessments may be designed to provide guidance for management initiatives for a region or watershed where multiple stressors, ecological values, and political factors influence decision making. These risk assessments require great flexibility and breadth and may use national risk-based information and site-specific risk information in conjunction with regional evaluations of risk. As risk assessment is more frequently used to support landscape-scale management decisions, the diversity, breadth, and complexity of the risk assessments increase significantly and may include evaluations that focus on understanding ecological processes influenced by a diversity of human actions and management options. Risk assessments used in this application are often based on a general goal statement and require significant planning to establish the purpose, scope, and complexity of the assessment. Part of the agreement on scope and complexity is based on the maximum uncertainty that is acceptable in whatever decision the risk assessment supports. The lower the tolerance for uncertainty, the greater the scope and complexity needed in the risk assessment. Risk assessments completed in response to legal mandates and likely to be challenged in court often require rigorous attention to acceptable levels of uncertainty to ensure that the assessment will be used in a decision. A frank discussion is needed between the risk manager and risk assessor on sources of uncertainty in the risk assessment and ways uncertainty can be reduced (if necessary) through selective investment of resources. Where appropriate, planning could account for the iterative nature of risk assessment and include explicitly defined steps or tiers. Guidance on addressing the 26 interplay of management decisions, study boundaries, data needs, uncertainty, and specifying limits on decision errors may be found in EPA’s guidance on data quality objectives (U.S. EPA, 1994). Download 361.05 Kb. Share with your friends:
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