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What is ReVA?
| Where is the Mid-Atlantic? |
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| The Mid-Atlantic region includes the states of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia and parts of New York and North Carolina. |
EPA's Regional Vulnerability Assessment (ReVA) program is an approach to regional scale, priority-setting assessment being developed by EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD). ReVA will expand cooperation among the laboratories and centers of ORD, by integrating research on human and environmental health, ecorestoration, landscape analysis, regional exposure and process modeling, problem formulation, and ecological risk guidelines.
This program is part of the Integrated Science for Ecosystem Challenges Initiative for FY 2000 sponsored by the White House Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources (CENR). As such, the scope of ReVA is to conduct pilot assessments that focus on one geographic region that is well characterized biologically. The ReVA program will be responsible for the collection, management, and analysis of multiple data sources to evaluate environmental conditions and known stressors within the Mid-Atlantic region.
Extensive effort has been made to evaluate environmental condition and known stressors within the Mid-Atlantic region, but predicting future environmental risk to prioritize efforts to protect and restore environmental quality efficiently and effectively is still difficult. ReVA is being developed to identify those ecosystems most vulnerable to being lost or permanently harmed in the next 5 to 25 years and to determine which stressors are likely to cause the greatest risk. The goal of ReVA is not exact predictions, but identification of the undesirable environmental changes expected over the coming years. The ReVA program will extend environmental assessments for the region by using integrative technologies to predict future environmental risk and support informed, proactive decision-making and prioritization of issues for risk management.