ABSTRACT
The idea of risk has proved to be an attractive concept for dealing with a variety of environmental policy problems such as regulation of discharges, cleanup of contaminated land, and registration of new chemicals. The reason for its attractiveness seems to be because of the basically quantitative nature of the concept and because it allows a variety of problems associated with human activities to be expressed in a common currency. This chapter addresses the scientific approach to ecological risk assessment, with emphasis on an axiomatic and theoretically consistent framework.
