ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the potential of cumulative risk assessment (CRA) to improve policy decisions about environmental justice. The collective nature of CRA embodies several contemporary and distinct ideas. First, harmful entities (e.g. environmental stressors, levels of toxicity), events (e.g. duration and frequency of exposure), and outcomes (e.g. discomfort, dysfunction, disability, disease) accumulate, causing aggregate quantities of multiple stressors and stressor-related effects to increase. Second, for risk assessment purposes, these factors along with as-yet-unspecified contributors can be lumped together to estimate cumulative effects. And third, although it is still uncertain whether interactions among stressors are additive, non-additive, or some combination, one can visualize accumulation of adverse effects as occurring vertically within specific risk categories (e.g. inhalation), and lumping them together as happening horizontally across diverse risk categories (e.g. inhalation, ingestion, dermal absorption). As currently constituted, CRA can encompass either accumulation within a risk classification, lumping across risk classifications, or both.
