Setting Air Quality Standards for PM2.5 : A Role for Subjective Uncertainty in NAAQS Quantitative Risk Assessments?

Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis
Anne E Smith

Abstract

The U.S. Clean Air Act (CAA) requires the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set and periodically review national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for criteria pollutants. Because NAAQS must be set without balancing health risks against cost, Administrators look for where health risk tapers off. For some pollutants, however, no evidence exists of such a diminishment. The Administrator must instead evaluate how the strength of evidence for the scientific validity of risk estimates weakens for exposure levels below the central mass of observations indicating a pollutant-health risk relationship. Such an evaluation requires judgments about uncertainties that are inherently subjective. The risk assessments the Agency prepares during NAAQS reviews provide a natural platform for quantitatively characterizing these subjective uncertainty judgments, but the Agency is no longer making use of this opportunity. This article describes EPA's early development of methods to quantitatively characterize subjective uncertainty in NAAQS risk assessments, then traces the progressive elimination of such uncertainty analysis in the risk assessments for the three past NAAQS reviews for fine particulate matter (PM...Continue Reading

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Sep 16, 2016·Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis·Roger O McClellan
Sep 28, 2016·Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis·D Warner North

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Citations

Jun 25, 2020·Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis·Michael GreenbergFelicia Wu
Oct 28, 2019·Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis·Anne E Smith

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