ABSTRACT
A brief introduction to the concepts of environmental risk assessment (ERA) is given below to introduce the readers to the concepts and ideas that combine the knowledge about the concentration of a polluting component with its properties to assess an environmental risk. The environmental concentration of a polluting component is usually known by analyses, or it can be estimated or found more or less indirectly by environmental modeling (see, for instance, Jørgensen and Fath, 2011). The topic of the next section is the properties of the polluting components that are usually more difficult to assess than the environmental concentrations. An integration of all sources and their effects are needed before we go to the diagnosis (in Part IV). The last section in this chapter discusses this integration, which may be denoted as an analysis.
