全球智库信息集成服务系统

Public agencies at all levels of government have conducted comparative risk projects to inform environmental priority-setting efforts. Using the analytic policy tool, comparative risk analysis (CRA), most projects have ranked environmental problems in terms of the relative risks they pose to human health and other endpoints. Differences in project design complicate cross-project analysis of the risk ranking results. This paper discusses important project design variations that complicate cross-project analysis and presents a methodology that provides a simple, straightforward approach for comparing risk ranking results that overcomes some of these project-specific idiosyncrasies. The methodology provides a mechanism to help practitioners of CRA determine how their risk ranking results compare with other projects. The paper also illustrates how the methodology can be applied to develop a consolidated ranking of the most often ranked environmental health problems. Thirty-nine completed human health CRAs are analyzed to determine which ten environmental problems have most often been cited in comparative risk projects as posing the most significant threats to human health.