Course: BLD 159 Intro to Brownfield Remediation, Land Re-use, and Public Health

Reading: The 4 Step Risk Assessment Process

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Step 4: Risk Characterization

Step 4 - Risk Characterization: To summarize and integrate information from the proceeding steps of the risk assessment to synthesize an overall conclusion about risk.

A risk characterization conveys the risk assessor's judgment as to the nature and presence or absence of risks, along with information about how the risk was assessed, where assumptions and uncertainties still exist, and where policy choices will need to be made. Risk characterization takes place in both human health risk assessments and ecological risk assessments.

In practice, each component of the risk assessment (e.g. hazard assessment, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment) has an individual risk characterization written to carry forward the key findings, assumptions, limitations, and uncertainties. The set of these individual risk characterizations provide the information basis to write an integrative risk characterization analysis.

The final, overall risk characterization thus consists of the individual risk characterizations plus an integrative analysis. The overall risk characterization informs the risk manager and others about the rationale behind EPA's approach to conducting the risk assessment - why EPA did what it did to assess the risk.