The Environmental And Human Health Risk Assessment: Methodology And Decision Support Systems

The presence of sources of pollution which release chemicals of concern into environmental media designate a major threat for human health and ecosystems. In general regulations prescribe the observance of emission threshold values for single sources and quality limit values and alert thresholds for separate environmental media, nevertheless the complete impact evaluation of industrial, agricultural and civil activities on environment requires a detailed and global analysis, in which manifold aspects of a specific area of interest are taken into account. A complete Environmental and Human Health Risk Assessment (EHHRA) procedure to quantify the adverse effects of exposure to carcinogenic or toxic substances is a fundamental focus both in order to control and monitor the environmental impact of existing plants and infrastructures and to prevent adverse effects (especially on human beings) by means of good manages of new installations and land use planning. The analysis is a well-consolidated procedure, and requires the integration of information on environmental and chemicals database, inter and intra media dispersion models output, site description maps, exposure patterns and demographic database. In addition, to include uncertainties and variability, probabilistic risk assessment and sensitivity analysis of calculation input parameters form an integral part of the analysis. As a result, the designing and conducting analysis of the effects of contaminants on human health is a complex and time expensive procedure, which call for the support of Decision Support Systems (DSS). A useful assistance in managing a large amount of spatial and non-spatial data is represented in particular by the GIS Decision Support Systems, explicitly designed to assist decision research process for complex spatial problems such as EHHRA. An examination of the existing literature on human health risk assessment tools is presented. Among these, the description of the EHHRA-GIS tool is detailed, pointing out the open architecture of the methodology approach, the implemented models, the performance and the potential developments of the tool. The upper-bound excess lifetime cancer risk and non-carcinogenic hazards are evaluated as risk measures, the spatial distribution of which is calculated and mapped on the involved territory.