While risk assessment continues to drive most environmental management decision-making, its methods and assumptions have been criticized for, among other things, perpetuating environmental injustice. The justice challenges to risk assessment claim that the process ignores the unique and multiple hazards facing low-income and people of color communities and simultaneously excludes the local, non...

A growing awareness of the value of indigenous knowledge has prompted calls for its use within disaster risk reduction. The use of indigenous knowledge alongside scientific knowledge is increasingly advocated but there is as yet no clearly developed framework demonstrating how the two may be integrated to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards. This paper presents such a framew...

T he Centers for Disease Con­ trol and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Environmental Public Health Tracking Network CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) began with the idea that health and environmental problems are not always separate issues with unrelated solutions. When the Tracking Program was funded in 2002, no systems existed at the state or national level to track m...

Risk management, done well, should be inherently precautionary. Adopting an appropriate degree of precaution with respect to feared health and environmental hazards is fundamental to risk management. The real problem is in deciding how precautionary to be in the face of inevitable uncertainties, demanding that we understand the equally inevitable false positives and false negatives from screeni...

People living near environmental hazards may develop symptoms and health conditions that require specialized monitoring and treatment by healthcare providers. One emerging environmental hazard is coal ash. Coal ash is comprised of small particles containing heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and radioactive elements. The overall purpose of this study was to explore whether healthca...

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly ...

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly ...

In 2008, the world was hit by some of the worst natural disasters. The Cyclone Nargis killed over 140,000 people and led to 10 billion financial losses. The Great Sichuan Earthquake caused over 60,000 deaths and 20 billion of estimated property damages. How do we get prepared for natural hazards? How do we enhance our resilience to natural hazards? Part of the answer lies in innovative techniqu...