Strengthen Risk Assessment and Management through a Substance Flow Based Model
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chen, Pi-Cheng
Abstract
This research faces a pressing need in environmental risk assessment. The care of the public about the preventative risk management is upsurging. However, a knowledge gap for risk management for hazardous substances still exist for the complicated linkage between the causes and effects with the scope of interacting economy and environmental systems. Aiming at filling this gap, this research took the advantages of different systemic analysis tools to illustrate the health risks due to the exposure to anthropogenic hazardous substances. With the big pictures derived from our analyses, more opportunities through changing the causes can be identified to reduce the risks. The three key methods are substance flow analysis, input-output modeling, and environmental risk assessment. Substance flow analysis was used to characterize metabolism of society; input-output modeling was used to elaborate the complicated supply-demand interaction between sectors; environmental risk assessment was used to quantify the damage on human health caused by anthropogenic sources. This research investigated the opportunities in the systems of country-wde scope and city/county-wide scope. The potential of environmetal health risk was measured at both scopes in the case studies of arsenic and that of lead, including their compounds. One novelty of our approach is the integration of method in to a model that allows to backtrack the contributions of different causes to the overall anthropogenic health risk of a substance. The model was designed with the inspiration of the DPSIR framework, which addresses the key components of the cause-effect chain of environmental problem. The models combines the DPSI modules for economic metabolism as the Driving forces, emissions as the Pressure, addition to envirionmental concentration as the State changes, and exposure and characterized health risk as the Impact. Thus, the complicated linkage can be presented and examined for effect of changes toward the current state of economic metabolism of a hazardous substance. To derive the options for changes, the proposed approach provides two major advantages, includinhg the insights into the possible rise of risk in the trend of industrial development and possible level of risk reduction. Several scenarios were analyzed and compare to demonstrate the magnitude of increment or reduction, in comparison with the state of the base line health risk. Regarding the value and application of the proposed approach, the uncertainty is specified and discussed for the applicability. The combination of the normally national-scaled substance flow analysis, and the normally locally-scaled environmental risk analysis inevitably lead to a compromise in the precsion and accuracy of model result, though a big picture of the interaction between economic metabolism and environmental health risk can be generated. Therefore, the results derived from our modelling technique should serve as quick screening tool for findling the actors playing big role to the increment of anthropogenic envornmental health risk. The rough comparsion of the scenarios, with respect to the changes, can be taken as a referencial information for the decision makers to set their priority of their environmental health risk management measures.
Subjects
Substance flow analysis
environmental risk assessment
economic input-output analysis
transitioning of economic structure
advancemenmt of technology
driving forces
SDGs
Type
thesis
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