happyjyl
第54楼2008/10/20
“投入”和“投资”是两码事。“投入”的不光是资本,还包括时间、精力、观点、信息等。请参考下面的解释:
Usage Note: The noun input has been used as a technical term for about a century in fields such as physics and electrical engineering, but its recent popularity grows out of its use in computer science, where it refers to data or signals entered into a system for processing or transmission. In general discourse input is now widely used to refer to the transmission of information and opinion, as in The report questioned whether a President thus shielded had access to a sufficiently varied input to have a realistic picture of the nation or The nominee herself had no input on housing policy. In this last sentence the meaning of the term is uncertain: it may mean either that the nominee provided no opinions to the policymakers or that she received no information about housing policy. This vagueness in the nontechnical use of input may be one reason that some critics have objected to it (including, in an earlier survey, a majority of the Usage Panel). Though the usage is well established, care should be taken not to use the word merely as a way to imply an unwarranted scientific precision.
不过从上下文来说,“参与”、“介入”貌似也是可以的。但因为对风险管理不太懂,我还是持保留意见。
高卧东山
第59楼2008/10/20
1.5.2 RISK MANAGERS
Risk managers are individuals or teams with the responsibility and authority for making a decision that involves risk. In some cases, the role is clearly assigned. For example, in the remediation of contaminated sites under Superfund, the Remedial Project Manager is the US EPA official responsible for deciding what remedial actions should be taken. Risk assessors are clearly responsible for providing technical support to that individual. However, in other cases the role is less clear. For example, in both the United States and Europe, risk assess¬ments of new chemicals are performed using a standard approach which leads to a conclusion that the chemical is acceptable or unacceptable in a proposed use. As a result, although individual risk assessors do not have decision-making authority, their analyses generate a decision, not simply a risk estimate. However, the authorized officials will step in when decisions are not routine or when new methods are proposed.
The relationship between risk assessors and risk managers is highly variable among nations and regulatory contexts. One reason is the relative concern in different risk assessment contexts for relevance and independence from biases. Clearly, if a risk assessment does not provide the information needed by a risk manager, it is largely a wasted effort. Therefore, the risk manager must provide the charge to the risk assessors, and should be available to inform the judgments that must be made on the basis of policy rather than fact in the course of the assessment. On the other hand, risk managers have biases that cause them to prefer certain outcomes to risk assessments a priori. Therefore, if a risk manager is too involved in the technical analyses, the results will appear biased and may in fact be biased. Therefore, the original guidance for risk assessment in the US federal government emphasized the need to isolate the risk manager who is politically accountable from the technical experts who must provide a credibly unbiased application of science (NRC 1983). Since then, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme so that the same august body has called for extensive input by risk managers and stakeholders (NRC 1994). As suggested in the previous paragraph, the rela¬tionship is also influenced by the extent to which the risk assessment is routine. Site-specific assessments and unconventional or high-profile assessments are more likely to receive attention from a risk manager.
The US EPA's framework for ERA, in keeping with the 1983 National Research Council guidance, shows the risk manager outside the risk assessment box (Figure 3.1). However, practice is highly variable, even within the US EPA. Risk assessors should be aware of who has the authority to make the risk management decision and how they prefer to receive technical support.
高卧东山
第60楼2008/10/20
1.5.3 STAKEHOLDERS
Stakeholders are people or organizations that have a particular interest in the outcome of an environmental management decision. Examples include people who live on or near a contam¬inated site, parties responsible for contamination, environmental advocates, fishermen and other harvesters of biotic resources, manufacturers of a new chemical, and recreational users of a resource. Although the public as a whole has a stake in environmental management decisions, the stakeholders in a decision are a much smaller group with particular concerns. Therefore, the risk manager must consider public interests as distinct from stakeholder interests.
The role of stakeholders has been emphasized in recent risk assessment guidance (NRC 1993; The Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Manage¬ment 1997). That emphasis is more appropriate for human health risk assessment both because stakeholders are typically focused on health or economic concerns, and because the stakeholder input is usually more relevant to those concerns.
Stakeholder involvement is important when remediation or treatment is driven by fears rather than risks or observed effects, and those fears differ among communities. For example, in most communities public fears could force remediation of radionuclides to levels "as low as reasonably achievable," even when those levels are far below background. However, in some communities such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or Los Alamos, New Mexico, risk assessments can be more influential because the public is well educated, knowledgeable, and familiar with radiation issues. Such differential fears do not occur among nonhuman organisms, but levels of concern for nonhuman organisms and ecosystems vary greatly among communities and interest groups.
Economic considerations associated with issues of fairness are also important stakeholder inputs. Some will bear the cost and others, the benefits of a decision. These issues are complicated by the problem of environmental justice, the concern that some racial or ethnic groups bear an unfair burden of environmental pollution. There are no such feelings of victimization or inequity among plants and nonhuman animals.
Although different levels of risk may be appropriate for different human communities because of differences in their risk aversion, stakeholder preferences do not necessarily provide a basis for differential protection of birds or plants in different communities. Agen¬cies must enforce requirements of environmental laws, whether or not the local human community is concerned. For example, cranes are a national and world heritage resource, but local communities on the Platt River want to withdraw water that is needed for crane habitat. Those stakeholder preferences should not trump the legal protections or ethical obligations applied to those birds. However, if stakeholders are ignored or thwarted, they will, as in the Platt River case, use legal or political processes to achieve their aims. Alterna¬tively, stakeholders may raise specific and legitimate community concerns for the nonhuman environment that would not be raised or given great significance by risk assessors or risk managers. For example, indigenous peoples along the Columbia River attribute religious and cultural as well as economic value to salmon. Similarly, fishermen are concerned about lesions, tumors, and deformities in fish that would not concern many ecologists.
In many cases, ecological risk assessors are in the position of educating stakeholders concerning the attributes of the environment that are at risk and their relationship to human welfare. However, assessors must also be open to learning from stakeholders who may have knowledge or concerns that are relevant to the assessment.
Risk assessors should realize that stakeholders might have agendas that are not consistent with increasing the understanding of risks to improve the rationality of decisions. Usually, some parties will have a stake in ignorance, because additional data and analyses are likely to weaken their position. Who they are depends in part on who bears the burden of proof. If regulators must prove that risks are excessive before taking action, the manufacturers of new products have an interest in limiting information. However, if manufacturers must prove the safety of a new product, the manufacturers of existing competitive products and environmen¬talists who are opposed to new technologies have an interest in limiting information. Similarly, if people feel that they have been injured by a product, and have attained public and political sympathy, they have an interest in rapid judgment rather than study and analysis. Some stakeholders will advocate additional data gathering and assessment as a delaying tactic rather than from a desire to improve the quality of the decision. For example, manufacturers of a hazardous product are likely to argue that there is not enough information to regulate it. An awareness of these unstated agendas is important when stakeholders participate in the planning of assessments or influence the information provided to risk managers.
Finally, stakeholders may be more than sources of goals or issues of concern. In some cases, stakeholders will generate data and even conduct their own risk assessment. Those risk assess¬ments may be used as a basis for legally challenging a risk manager's decision or may be presented to the risk manager as an alternative to the assessment performed by his own assessors.