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Contribution to Book
Chapter 2: Prioritizing Environmental Risks to Health
Environmental Burden of Disease Assessment: A Case Study in the United Arab Emirates (2013)
  • Ying Li
  • Henry H. Willis
  • Aimee Curtright
  • Gary Cecchine
  • Zeinab S. Farah
  • Sandra A. Geschwind
  • Jianhui Hu
  • Melinda Moore
  • Sarah Olmstead
  • Hanine Salem
  • Regina A. Shih
  • J. Jason West
Abstract
This chapter discusses in detail the process we used to engage stakeholders in further refining the scope of issues to consider in this environmental burden of disease assessment. First, we provide background on innate human cognitive biases that affect our perceptions of risk and how these biases pose challenges to rational priority setting. Then, we describe previous international experiences in prioritizing environmental risks to health for policymaking. Next, we describe the systematic approach used here to prioritize environmental risk factors—an approach that compensates for cognitive biases, incorporates scientific information, systematically involves multiple stakeholders, and builds on international experiences. Finally, we describe how we implemented this ranking process and how the results led to the eight environmental risk factor categories that are the subjects of the remaining chapters of this book: outdoor air pollution, indoor air pollution, occupational exposures, climate change, drinking water contamination, coastal water pollution, soil and groundwater contamination, and produce and seafood contamination.
Keywords
  • comparative risk assessment,
  • risk summary sheets,
  • environmental and public health stakeholders,
  • categorizing environmental health risks,
  • deliberative approach for ranking risks,
  • risk analysis research,
  • setting priorities for environmental health risk management,
  • cognitive biases in risk perception
Publication Date
2013
Editor
Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, Frederic J. P. Launay, Jens T. W. Thomsen, Angela Brammer, Christopher Davidson
Publisher
Springer
ISBN
9789400759251
DOI
10.1007/978-94-007-5925-1_2
Citation Information
Ying Li, Henry H. Willis, Aimee Curtright, Gary Cecchine, et al.. "Chapter 2: Prioritizing Environmental Risks to Health" Dordrecht, the NetherlandsEnvironmental Burden of Disease Assessment: A Case Study in the United Arab Emirates (2013) p. 521
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ying-li/16/