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Regulatory risk assessment flawed, new DEC chief says Incorrectly used, risk assessment directs attention to infinitesimal harm; Ballard says it’s time to choose rationality over fatalism Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
Ernesta Ballard, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, has issued a call for reconsideration of how one of the basic tools of regulators is being used. Risk assessment — a crucial tool in environmental regulation — has been turned against regulatory agencies, Ballard said Feb. 20.
Ballard has spent 20 years working “at one angle or another of regulatory strategy,” she told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, and over those years regulators have increasingly “relied on risk assessment to achieve the environmental protection which is our responsibility.”
But, she said, risk assessment no longer functions as it once did.
“In my 20 years of personal experience in the government, I now believe that the application of risk assessment is seriously flawed in one key respect,” Ballard said.
Risk assessment “has been uncoupled from reward, from personal reward and the choice to take the risk, in a way that has eliminated any personal incentive to risk and has created the 'not in my backyard' syndrome that we struggle with in our effort to do anything in resource development here in Alaska,” she said.
Risk assessment based on science and mathematics In risk assessment, Ballard said, science and mathematics are used “to recognize probability and variable outcomes.” The basics of risk assessment, proportionality and causality, were developed in the 15th through the 17th centuries.
Look at Greek civilization, she said. They were a rational people who mapped the stars, developed advanced mathematics and understood human anatomy. “But the Greeks had absolutely no concept — nor did they have the mathematical tools to develop the concepts — of odds and outcomes.”
The future was the whim of the gods for the Greeks, Ballard said, and “forecast had absolutely no meaning in Greek civilization.” Examination of animal entrails and shaking of bones were used to foretell the future. The first tools needed to make predictions were developed, she said, in the 14th to 16th centuries by gamblers who found mathematical ways to calculate odds.
“In 15th century Italy, modern western society finally developed the skills that are necessary to make present decisions based on a reasonable expectation of future results,” Ballard said, and “… the fatalism of the Greeks was eliminated and replaced with quantifiable and rational understanding of reality. Causality and consequence replaced fatalism.”
The development of tools to forecast outcomes was crucial, Ballard said, “because in the 17th century technology, complicated machinery, international trade … necessitated complex choices.
“Big undertakings required understanding the alternatives,” she said. Building blocks Ballard described the basic concepts which contributed to the development of risk analysis and of the study of risk.
The development of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century — goods coming in for money going out — introduced a concept of proportionality, which “shattered the Medieval concept of fatalism and ushered in the rationalism that has supported modern world technology,” she said.
At about the same time, a physician studying syphilis was exploring the causality and cure of the disease. Treatment was with mercury, but more patients died of mercury poisoning than of syphilis. He explored proportionality, lowered the dose of mercury and saved lives.
In the 17th century a mathematician observing his own dysfunctional family's struggle for power noted that “satisfaction will be inversely proportionate to the quantity of goods previously possessed.” He is often quoted in texts on risk, Ballard said, because he “proved that when both the odds and the outcomes are personal, risk is a choice rather than a fate.”
What has gone wrong with risk assessment, she said, is that the risk assessed by regulatory agencies today “is no longer associated by anyone with personal choice and personal beneficial outcome. … In the highly charged arena of regulatory public involvement, risk is now characterized as a fate and no longer as a choice. Without any connection to the personal utility, no outcome is acceptable, no risk will be tolerated and no management solution short of total risk removal will even
be considered.”
Personal utility lost Risk assessment is a good tool for regulators, Ballard said. “It has standardized a useful approach to determining hazards, exposure, the role played by time and the possibilities for protection.”
But the element of personal utility has been lost.
“Contrary to the critics,” Ballard said, “risk assessment does not forecast individual fate.” What risk assessment does is to estimate “population-level possibilities.”
She used musical chairs to illustrate individual fate: If 100 people play musical chairs with 99 chairs, when the music stops one person will be without a chair. That, she said, is a certainty. But population-level analysis is something else, Ballard said. Consider 100 buffalo running across a field with a large hole. “It is possible that none, that one, or that more, will fall in.
“The risk assessment tool provides information for risk management: build a fence or fill in the hole,” Ballard said: “None of the buffalo need to encounter the hole.”
Risk assessment, a sound analytical tool, has been turned against regulators, she said.
“We are expected at the regulatory agencies to quantify every infinitesimal harm, but we are encouraged to ignore the bigger picture of benefit and choice. We are confronted with a new wave of fatalism,” Ballard said.
She called for a return to basics and a choice of rationalism over fatalism.
“It's time for us to get back to the basics of proportionality. It's time to show a little resilience.
“We must learn to distinguish the real from the frivolous and to reconnect the welfare of the modern world with good management decisions. When the likelihood of theoretical exposure is small, we must have the will to seek practical and not radical solutions. We must be less absorbed with personalized fear. We must acknowledge that capitalism and wealth can produce healthier people and a more vibrant natural environment than poverty and totalitarianism.”
Ballard said she believes risk assessment is a path that can be followed in “responsible resource development and responsible cleanup of contaminated sites in Alaska and in the United States.
“But,” she said, “we have to have the courage to take the chance that the management solution that we put in place provides adequate protection and to not resort to the fatalistic assumption that if we don't remove it all, there is no hope for a better world.”
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