Developing Environmental Risk Assessment Methodologies

Abstract

Environmental risk assessment (ERA) generally focuses on a specific human activity because each activity entails different variables and environmental indicators. Risk is inherent in environmental impact assessment (EIA) and can be calculated parallel to EIA. In previous studies, an EIA ontology (OEIA) and a method of obtaining brief ontologies for specific sectors of the main ontology were described. The main ontology specifies the relations between activities, their impacts, the affected environmental factors, and the pertinent ERA and EIA indicators. This paper describes, as a principal goal, a procedure to develop ERA methodologies for human activities. First, an ERA methodology for landfills is presented with a tree-based structure whose root node is the risk index. Mechanisms for considering other environmental variables and factors are specified, as well as the way to generalize the method to any human activity. Accordingly, this study proposes an OEIA-based tool that can be used to create customized ERA methodologies and thus to perform the ERA of any human activity. Finally, this process is illustrated with the example of leachate ponds.