SAB Panel Renews Doubts Over Risk Approach In EPA Draft Equity Guide

摘要

EPA advisors reviewing the agency's draft guidance for assessing rules' environmental justice impacts are raising concerns over its use of traditional risk assessment practices, renewing fears that such assessments are inadequate to assess harms to vulnerable subpopulations, though the agency has so far rejected the concerns. During the Science Advisory Board (SAB) panel's June 19-20 meeting, panelists cautioned that unless the guidance is revised to better account for vulnerable subpopulations, it is not likely to win support from advocates. "Clarification is going to be necessary," said Thomas Theis, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Theis and other panelists' concerns echo long-standing criticisms that environmental justice advocates have raised with EPA's use of traditional risk assessment to assess equity impacts. They have charged that the lengthy assessment process contains significant uncertainty, only considers a small group of health effects associated with a hazardous substance, and fails to capture vulnerable subpopulations and the heightened and cumulative exposures to hazardous substances the communities face.