Risk Interpretation of Chemical Contamination: Policy Decisions vs Scientific Conclusions

Abstract: Understanding the risks of chemical pollution has emerged as an urgent and indisputable concern of the 21st century, laden with insurmountable knowledge gaps. Rural areas are often disproportionately burdened by chemical contamination with insufficient resources to mitigate it. Given the exponential growth of synthetic compounds since Industrial Revolution, the rate of their environmental loading and the complexity of their intra- and inter-actions within the ecosystems, it is impossible to fully identify, categorise and aggregate all individual risks from all combinations of hazards, their pathways and targets. At best, it is possible to create approximations which are inherently encumbered with uncertainty. Risk and uncertainty are the fundamental themes of contamination discourses, and they standardize diverse environmental assessments which predicate all environmental intervention and management practices. As culture significantly influences scientific thought, likewise, risk as an ontological reality is largely understood through epistemic interpretive frames which emerge through multiple social processes. Decisions related to risk are not about risk alone, they pertain to choices among options which are made within social settings and express the values of those who decide the relative importance of different possible adverse consequences of a particular decision. Here we investigate the extent to which the value judgements of political decisions and scientific conclusions shape risk management outcomes in modern contamination contexts. We demonstrate that modern contamination risk management frameworks must be re-evaluated with respect to the value judgements and social processes within which they interpret scientific conclusions towards more robust and equitable pollution control.