Environmental risk is a probabilistic characteristic of a threat that arises both for the environment and for the person himself, in the case of various anthropogenic impacts or other events and phenomena. Any ecotoxicant is an undoubted stressor. Environmental risk assessment provides that a stressor is any impact: chemical, mechanical or field, which causes any change in ecological and biological systems, both negative and positive.
The concept of environmental risk assessment includes two elements: Risk Assesment, or risk assessment, and Risk Management, or risk management. Risk assessment is a scientific analysis of the origin, the identification and determination of the level of risk hazard in a given specific situation. The concept of "environmental risk" refers to sources of danger that threaten a particular environmental system or process that takes place in it. Environmental indicators of damage include biot destruction, harmful, possibly even irreversible impact on ecological systems, environmental degradation, which is associated with an increase in its pollution, the increase in the occurrence of various specific diseases, the death of large natural objects, such as lakes, seas, rivers, forests and so on.
Environmental risk can be managed. For this purpose, it is necessary at the beginning to analyze the risk situation itself, develop and justify a management decision in the form of a law or normative act, which will be aimed at reducing risk or finding ways to reduce it.
The theory of environmental risk forms the principles that characterize the attitude of the human community to the need to ensure trouble-free operation of technical facilities as sources of increased environmental hazard:
1) Zero environmental risk: this principle reflects people's confidence in the impossibility of causing damage to this facility.
2) Consistent approach to complete and absolute safety or zero risk: involves research in this direction on the use of technologies that reduce this risk.
3) Minimum environmental risk: the level of danger that can be reached as much as possible, based on the principle of justification for any costs to protect human security.
4) Balanced risk. According to this principle, any natural hazards and anthropogenic impacts are taken into account, and the degree of risk of each of the events and the conditions under which a person can be endangered is studied.
5) Acceptable risk. This principle is based on an analysis of the ratio of costs and risks, or benefits and risks, or costs and benefits. This concept is based on the assumption that eliminating the risk is completely either economically unprofitable or practically unfeasible, which means that it is worthwhile to establish a rational level of security at which costs are optimized to reduce the likelihood of risk and the amount of damage possible in the event of an emergency.
The first step in assessing the likely risk is to identify the real danger to both humans and the environment. At this stage, research plays an important role. Hazard identification means searching for its signal and its isolation from the general background.
At the second stage, the exposure is assessed, that is, the identification of which way, through which medium, in what quantity, when exactly and how long the impact will be.
The third is the assessment of the dependence of the effect on the dose — the determination of a quantitative regularity that relates the received dose of a harmful substance to the likelihood of adverse effects on health.
And the fourth is the result of all the previous ones, a characteristic of risk. It includes an assessment of all identified and possible adverse effects on human health.
