![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Tools for Evaluating Risk Management Decisions
Develop Tools for Risk Management Decisions
The Human Health Research Program is developing and validating public health tools, approaches, and indicators that can be used to reflect more closely the actual impact of environmental decision making on public health and to help clarify the health benefits and financial costs associated with further incremental environmental improvements. Under the Environmental Indicators Initiative, EPA has begun a process to better assess the “state of the environment” that may result from its policies and actions to improve environmental quality. The current label applied to this overall effort is accountability (i.e., the Agency's desire to be more accountable to the public in demonstrating true environmental progress).
Research to support risk management decisions is needed to better understand the impact of past Agency actions and to better estimate the impact of future decisions. Assessments of existing tools and development and validation of new ones will advance EPA's ability to evaluate outcomes such as exposure reduction and health benefits that result from its regulatory decisions and actions.
Goals
- Provide a matrix of local health data to convey the health status of vulnerable populations
- Develop questionnaire data on activity patterns for vulnerable populations
- Develop geographic information system maps of air quality and modeled exposures for air toxics, ozone, and particulate matter in New Haven, CT
- Apply and evaluate industrial source complex modeling approaches
- Determine exposure predictors of health outcomes for vulnerable populations
- Provide case studies demonstrating how measurements, models, and health effects analysis tools might be used in other communities and at the national level
- Link surrogate monitoring information to public health outcomes
- Provide tools for risk assessment methodologies in estimating public health impacts of drinking water regulations
- Aid the Agency in refining assumptions used to estimate waterborne disease
- Improve estimates of public health effects associated with recreational water criteria
- Contribute to the health chapter of the Report on the Environment