Guidance on Risk Characterization for Risk Managers and Risk Assessors (1992)
This guidance is intended for managers and assessors on describing risk assessment results in EPA reports, presentations, and decision packages. The guidance addresses a problem that affects public perception regarding the reliability of EPA's scientific assessments and related regulatory decisions.
The Agency must do everything we can to ensure that critical information from each stage of the risk assessment is communicated from risk assessors to their managers, from middle to upper management, from EPA to the public, and from others to EPA. With that in mind, the Risk Assessment Council reached several conclusions:
- We need to present a full and complete picture of risk, including a statement of confidence about data and methods used to develop the assessment;
- We need to provide a basis for greater consistency and comparability in risk assessments across Agency programs; and
- Professional scientific judgment plays an important role in the overall statement of risk.
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- Memorandum (PDF) (6 pp, 493K)
- Contents (PDF) (1 p, 13K)
- Section 1: Risk Assessment-Risk Management Interface (PDF) (6 pp, 336K)
- Section 2: Risk Characterization (PDF) (12 pp, 641K)
- Section 3: Exposure Assessment and Risk Descriptors (PDF) (14 pp, 689K)
- References (PDF) (1 p, 22K)
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