WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE RANKINGS?
Comparative risk projects can involve a great variety of individuals from varying backgrounds, or very few. Some projects are conducted exclusively by scientists and agency staff, while others rely heavily upon input from the general public. In reality, most projects fall somewhere in between. Technical Committees are usually staffed by agency staff and academic scientists. Representatives from industry and interests groups, as well as Technical Committee staff, are often included in Public Advisory Committees. The general public may have representatives on any of these committees, or become involved through surveys or town hall meetings. Many of the projects involve the general public in the issue selection and risk management phases, leaving much of the technical assessment to professionals in the field.

The Project Description section of every Scorecard report identifies who participated in a ranking project. To allow for comparison between projects, Scorecard categorizes participants as representatives from one of five stakeholder groups: General Public, Governmental Agencies, Private Sector/Industry, Public Interest/Nonprofit Organizations, and Scientific/Academic Community.

WHAT IS THE USUAL PROCESS?
Comparative risk projects involve a series of steps: participant and environmental issue selection, technical analysis, public input collection, risk ranking, priority ranking, environmental management planning, etc. The Project Description section of every Scorecard report identifies the process followed in a ranking project.

Most projects begin with the formation of some sort of Steering or Public Advisory Committee and Technical Committees (often Human Health, Ecological, and Quality of Life). The next step is the selection of a list of issue areas or environmental problems to be ranked. The Technical Committees often write reports for each of the issues areas and develop risk-based rankings. These reports and rankings are then submitted to a central committee (usually Steering or Public Advisory) and this body creates an integrated ranking of environmental risks. Finally, these ranked risks may be turned into an environmental risk management agenda.

While this is the common process, there are nearly as many variations as there are projects (e.g., many projects do not integrate their technical rankings).

IS COMPARATIVE RISK ANALYSIS QUANTITATIVE OR QUALITATIVE?
Comparative risk analysis can be quantitative, qualitative or both. Typically, initial analyses are more quantitative, relying upon Technical Committees to inform another committee about the quantitative risk associated with selected issue areas. However, the final rankings are invariably qualitative. Final rankings are often constructed by committees comprised of both technical and nontechnical staff. Judgements about the priority assigned to a problem reflect a variety of qualitative factors, such as the degree of public concern, the balance between costs and benefits, etc. Final rankings are usually categorical (high, medium, or low) and by definition involve qualitative judgments about the relative importance of different problems.

WHAT ISSUES ARE EVALUATED AND HOW ARE THEY CHOSEN?
The issues covered by comparative risk projects vary depending on the geographic area being assessed and the interests of participating stakeholders. US EPA regional ranking projects generally shared a common problem list, but most state and local projects have unique problem lists.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF RANKINGS PER PROJECT?
Most projects have multiple priority lists, based on rankings that address human health risks, ecological risks or other risk attributes. Whenever a project succeeded in developing a final ranking that integrates across several types of rankings, this list is presented first in that project's report (Vermont, for example). However, most projects never developed an integrated summary ranking (California, for example).

Multiple priority lists are to be expected given the complexity of any effort to set environmental priorities. To develop an integrated ranking, project participants need to reach consensus on a controversial series of value judgments: should human health risks be given the same weight as ecological risks? should rankings be based solely on risk magnitude or be balanced by considerations of cost and technical feasibility? should rankings reflect only technocratic assessments of risks or incorporate public risk perceptions? There are no easy answers to these questions, and may projects opted to leave them unaddressed by providing multiple rankings along different risk dimensions and refusing (or failing) to reach consensus on a single integrated priority list.

WHY ISN'T MY STATE OR AREA INCLUDED?
Not all states have committed to conduct environmental priority setting projects, and several major projects are still underway. New York, for example, is in the process of reviewing draft ranking reports. The Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy's Directory of Comparative Risk Projects is the best online index of project status across the U.S. As projects are concluded, they will be added to Scorecard's Environmental Priorities section.

WHERE DO THE LINKS TO ONLINE INFORMATION FOR EACH PROJECT COME FROM?
Scorecard provides links to online sources of information about the specific environmental problems being ranked by a project. These links lead to general information about a problem, and to area-specific information when available.

Please note that these links usually do not lead to the specific source of information that was relied upon during a comparative risk project. They are provided by Environmental Defense as a service to visitors interested in obtaining further information online about an environmental problem. Except for links into the Scorecard system, Environmental Defense does not endorse these off-site information resources.

Links have been selected using the following scheme. General links lead to a reliable and accessible online introduction to an environmental problem. Area-specific links lead to supporting documentation for a comparative risk project if it is available online (e.g., California, New Hampshire and Utah). Since most projects have not made their supporting materials available in digital form, Scorecard provides links to online resources created by federal or state regulatory agency or environmental organizations. First preference is given to environmental indicators that have been developed to evaluate various environmental problems. If these are unavailable, links to online databases useful for characterizing a problem in a specific area are provided. Environmental Defense assigns these resources to specific issues and areas using a data model that maps project issue names to a canonical set of environmental problem names and that tracks the geospatial coverage of various online resources.

ARE THERE ANY EVALUATIONS OF THESE DIFFERENT COMPARATIVE RISK PROJECTS?
See the following online resources for comparative evaluations of different priority setting projects:

EPA Regional Projects
Comparing Risks and Setting Environmental Priorities: Overview of Three Regional Projects

State Projects
State Comparative Risk Projects: A Force for Change
Can Comparative Risk be Used to Develop Better Environmental Decisions?
Comparative Risk Publications

Local Projects
Local Risk-based Planning: A Review of the Seattle Environmental Priorities Project.

HOW CAN I GET MORE INFORMATION ABOUT A SPECIFIC PROJECT?
Each report's reference section identifies the original reports that Scorecard used to summarize a project's environmental risk rankings, purpose, environmental risk ranking process, and risk ranking participants. The Contact Information section provides the best available current contact information for a project. Because some of the projects were completed several years ago, individual contacts, phone numbers, and even managing offices may no longer exist or may have been changed. Contact information may differ from reference information, and indicates the best place to begin a search for additional materials or contact individuals. Other good sources for contact information are:
Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy's Directory of Comparative Risk Projects
Western Center for Environmental Decision-Makinghttp://www.wced.org/.