Advisers Query EPA Over Lack Of Climate Change In New Ecorisk Plan

摘要

Members of a Science Advisory Board (SAB) panel are praising the agency's Risk Assessment Forum (RAF) for trying to tackle a handful of major policy changes intended to boost the importance of ecological risk assessment in agency priorities, but are also criticizing draft EPA documents for not addressing climate change. During a Feb. 22-23 conference call, several members of SAB's Ecological Processes and Effects Committee (EPEC) questioned why draft RAF documents seeking to adopt overarching policies such as calculation of ecosystem services and adaptive management do not address climate change issues, which they saw as outweighing any other issue. "The big elephant in the room is climate change. How is it being handled by EPA?" asked one EPEC member, Peter Chapman of the Canadian consulting firm Golder Associates. "It's so overriding we'd be absolutely remiss to discuss these other little things without addressing that."