Newsletter 6 HEROIC Roadmap To The White Paper On Policy And Technical Recommendations

While HEROIC is entering the final six months of the project, we take the opportunity to present our roadmap to the “White paper“, which is due at the end of the project and which is regarded as the major outcome of our Coordination action. The „White paper“ will feature policy and technical recommendations on how to better harmonize human and environmental risk assessments; it will summarize the key outputs and recommendations from each of the Work packages (WP) and pave the way forward for the development of an integrated risk assesssment (IRA) framework.
The overall objective of HEROIC is to give recommendations and guidance on how to establish a framework for IRA, while at the same time highlighting those areas where most urgently scientific progress is needed to close the gaps and reach that ultimate goal. HEROIC aims to explore different ways of improvement, harmonization and cross-fertilization of tools and methods used in environmental and human risk assessments, in particular by:

  • exploring and evaluating the cross-disciplinary use of hazard and exposure data in human and environmental risk assessments to optimize resources use and meet current needs of risk management and policy-making;
  • fostering cross-disciplinary cooperation and mutual understanding among human and environmental scientists, including risk assessors and risk managers;
  • showing the added value of IRA and promoting its acceptance to a broad stakeholder audience, including risk managers, policy makers and NGOs.

HEROIC has addressed these issues through its different WP activities, whose major outputs will feed into the „White paper“. Those anticipated outputs are briefly summarized below.
Based on i) a status map and a gaps and needs analysis of current risk assessment processes (WP2); and ii) on an inventory of data and models available for hazard characterization and exposure assessment (WP3), innovative approaches and further opportunities for extrapolating across human and environmental hazard and exposure assessments were identified and discussed during several expert workshops. As a follow up to these activities, recommendations for a more transparent, structured and robust framework to integrate various sources of information for hazard and exposure assessment will be drafted.

Evaluating how human and environmental risk assessors cross-evaluate and integrate (eco)toxicological data to come to a decision is an important element to illustrate how, where and why human and environmental risk assessments are done differently. As part of WP4 activities, an expert consultation was organized to analyze expert decision rules and identify the main drivers for integration in the decision-making process, based on two selected case studies (skin sensitization and endocrine disruption). This work, together with a comprehensive analysis of existing weight of evidence (WoE) frameworks and approaches for evaluating (eco)toxicological and exposure data quality with a focus on relevance, reliability and uncertainty, will serve as an input to draft recommendations to improve the WoE process in risk assessment. In turn, this will contribute to develop a more robust and more transparent integrated decision-making process framework.

As a complement to the approach taken by WP4, a broad open scale stakeholder consultation was launched as part of WP6 to collect opinions on potential socio-behavioural factors that interplay and may influence the decision making process in the way experts evaluate risk to come to a conclusion. The objective of this work is to better highlight how this qualitative component, e.g. in term of human values and preferences, may contribute to shape current policy priorities, protection goals and perception among different societal groups, and how knowledge in risk assessment is interpreted by risk managers and translated into risk management options. Results will be further refined through a follow up roundtable and contribute to an improved knowledge of decision-making and offer some perspectives for the development of a framework for IRA.

The white paper will also integrate the output from WP5 and WP6 communication and dissemination activities of scientific knowledge through the development of capacity building material and web-based tools (open-acess platform Tox-Hub, e-training material, methods).