New approach methodologies for contaminant risk assessment in environmental justice communities: let’s not miss the opportunity

New approach methodologies (NAMs) are emergent tools and methods that are increasingly being viewed by the regulatory and scientific community as ones that can support or even replace traditional (ie, conventional) approaches for use in chemical hazard, exposure, and risk assessments. New approaches ultimately promise to improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, resource requirements, and ethical challenges associated with conventional assessment approaches. Despite escalating activity in the field, less common in the 'NAMs' discourse is the consideration of the specific priorities and needs of Environmental Justice (EJ) communities. These communities are racialized, marginalized, and low-income communities who face disproportionate health impacts related to environmental contamination. Traditional risk, exposure, and hazard assessment methods have been critiqued as generic, institutionalized, and failing to capture the unique and disproportionate health risks of importance to communities themselves. Despite an understanding of the need to include EJ communities in chemicals management, there remains little to no information on their inclusion in the design of NAMs (which are expected to eventually be adopted for regulatory use). This commentary argues that "now" is the time to ensure that EJ considerations are designed into NAMs, and that EJ communities are meaningfully involved. We separate the paper into sections on exposure, hazard and risk assessment. For each section, we provide some comments on the challenges with conventional methods that have been documented in EJ community contexts, followed by our perspectives on opportunities to build new approaches. We conclude by ideating future directions in three areas: the role of regulatory systems, the design of NAMs for EJ community contexts, and the building of capacity for researchers and EJ communities to collaborate on NAMs design and implementation. With the ultimate goal of more equitable chemicals management, these perspectives and ideas hope to inform the development of EJ community-relevant NAMs.