ABSTRACT
Your risk characterization or any other synthesis phase of an assessment should have two major components. The first is an analysis that synthesizes the exposure and effects and explains the methods used to derive them. You should communicate those results in a way that clarifies the importance and adversity of estimated effects, the evidence supporting the estimates, and the potential implications (USEPA 1998, USEPA 2014c). The second component is the context of those results which explains their implications. By analogy to a scientific paper, in the characterization, you are creating a combined results and discussion section for the assessment. A decision-maker should be able to skip the problem formulation and analyses, read only your synthesis, and come away with sufficient information to inform the decision. This chapter focuses on risk characterization. However, the concepts apply to syntheses of other types of environmental assessments (Section 8.5).
