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<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment>

An Essay and Workshop for Local Elected Leaders on Environmental Governance
with Emphasis on Adopting Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs)
- Training for Elected Leadership -

Part II - Workshop on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- WORKSHOP -

WORKSHOP COMPONENTS

13.10 Trainer Presentation: ENVIRONMENTAL RISK ASSESSMENT

To help participants recognize the value of regular, systematic assessment of environmental risks and to use assessment data to set priorities for local government intervention.

Develop a short presentation to prepare participants for the next exercise on environmental risk assessment. As preparation, use material from Part I of the preceding essay, Assessing Risks, supplemented by the following information and ideas of your own.

Risk is the likelihood of adverse effects resulting from exposure to dangerous events or conditions. Assessment is a systematic process for examining the potential exposure of people and the ecology to the harm presented by a risk. Environmental risk assessment is a way of estimating the environmental risk to humans or ecological systems from toxic agents. Applied to the role of government, an environmental risk assessment can provide councillors with an economically, socially, and politically defensible basis for investments in policies or programmes to protect, preserve or enhance the local environment.

Environmental risk assessment is a practice long used to evaluate the probable risk to human life from adverse elements in the environment. The process has become more sophisticated over the years as exposure to adverse elements in the environment has become increasingly common. The need for a systematic process for assessing risk has been stimulated in recent years by several factors. One of these is population growth, urbanization and industrialization, flooding, land slides, noise and many other problems which have vastly different consequences for more and less developed parts of the world. Another factor is the increasing concern for potential harm to ecological systems, resulting in a new body of knowledge about non-human elements in the environment leading to a process known as ecological risk assessment. Further complicating things is a vast increase in the amount of information available to the public about the hazards of environmental pollution spurred on by large-scale and widely publicized environmental disasters like Chernobyl and Mt. Pinatubo.

Undertaking an environmental risk assessment is a process with three steps. The first step is problem formulation or taking steps to more fully understand environmental problems that are a potential risk to humans or the ecology (refer to Exercise 13.4 for a review of the problem formulation process).

The second step in undertaking an environmental risk assessment is analysis of the potential exposure and effects. Analysis includes all necessary steps to evaluate the extent of long and short term consequences of the environmental exposure facing the community. The third step, risk characterization, is the integration of both the exposure and the effect of that exposure on those who would be adversely effected. These two steps, often technically demanding, may persuade the council to seek the specialized knowledge and skill of experts. Expertise such as this often can be found near home, although characterization of the risk may make it necessary to seek technical assistance elsewhere.

It is important for local officials to realize that technical assistance is only part of the process of finding solutions to complex environmental problems. Environmental risk assessment is a means for assembling relevant information about a problem. It is not, in itself, a decision about what should be done. What is done is a judgment call by the people concerned based in part on their understanding of the data but also on their values, fears, and concepts of what is important. It is the task of the councillor to interpret the will of the people and act accordingly.

The Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP) is a process for assessing environmental issues leading to the discovery of environmental hazards (natural and human-induced). SCP is the product of an operational collaboration between UNCHS (Habitat) and UNEP. An important step in the SCP is the assembly and analysis of existing data on a participating community's environmental problems. Together with information on the community's existing environmental infrastructure and services and on nearby ecological systems, a SCP Environment Profile is compiled. The profile becomes the community's environmental data base. It is gradually refined through public discussion and used to reach agreement on strategies and action plans by problem-specific working groups consisting of stakeholders and technical support staff.

The Sustainable Ismailia Project is good illustration of environmental profiling. Ismailia is an Egyptian town of 270,000 inhabitants located on the Suez Canal. An early step in Ismailia's SCP was the preparation of an environmental profile. The profile was prepared to identify both environmental and developmental concerns. Some of the concerns identified for development of the profile were these:

• Land tenure and physical constraints greatly hamper the reclamation of lands that have become waterlogged and overly saline in content because of inadequate drainage.
• There is increasing pollution of Lake Timsah, an important tourist attraction, from ships and shipyard activity, pesticide run-off from agricultural hinterlands, and sewage from unserviced parts of the community.
• A complex institutional framework in Ismailia complicates decision making with much of the power centralized in line ministries, severe constraints on the mobilization of local resources, and many national agencies with extraordinarily independent powers.
• Environmental data is dispersed throughout many local institutions or can be found only by searching through national or international agency offices in Cairo.
• While the economy is dominated by government, there is a dynamic private sector in the areas of land reclamation, manufacturing, tourism and contracting.
• Non-profit organization, whether community-based or vountary, are weakly represented in Ismailia.¹³

Ismailia's profile was more than a data base on environmental concerns. It included development issues as well. Also analysed was the physical, economic, and institutional context within which environmental action planning would take place.

Risk Assessment is a process for examining the potential exposure of people and the ecology to the harm presented by an existing or potential risk. Assessment of environmental risk is a process consisting of three steps: problem formulation, analysis of exposure and effects, and risk characterization. Environmental profiles, an important component of the Sustainable Cities Programme, provide decision makers with a comprehensive and renewable source of information on a community's most critical environmental issues, the capacity of its infrastructure and institutions to respond, and the vulnerability of its ecology to systemic environmental hazards.

Table of Contents

• Brochure
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• International Year of Forests
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• World Environment Day
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• UNEP Campaign
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