Improving long-term environmental policies, technology and risk assessment

Risk assessment in environmental management is increasingly becoming an important part of the formal environmental impact assessment process. There are a wide range of tools and methods applicable to environmental management problems.

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

1. Risk assessment though risk management needs to acknowledge a wider set of issues. Stakeholders typically come from a variety of backgrounds each with different and sometimes incommensurable value systems that shape and confound basic risk assessment and communication processes. Not only are environmental risks multi-faceted but their regulation and control is fundamentally the result of strategically interacting players.

1. Reforming policy
2. Increasing environmental sensitivity within government policies
3. Improving
4. Applying science sustainably

1. Promoting strategic environmental impact assessment
2. Conducting technology assessments

1. Monitoring technical developments in national environmental action plans
2. Controlling environmental impact of technology
3. Assessing environmental impacts

1. Conducting natural resources damage assessments

1. Using sustainable technologies
2. Assessing risk

1. Short-termism
2. Risk-aversion
3. Risk