Advancing the weight-of-evidence approach to enable chemical environmental risk assessment for decision making and achieving protection goals.

Abstract

The Weight of Evidence (WoE) approach conflates the aspects of quality, reliability, relevance, and consistence of data and information to systematically strengthen the body of evidence and enables credible communication and decision making on chemical risk assessment. Between 2015 and 2019, SETAC held multiple Workshops in all the Geographical Units with scientists and managers from academia, government, and business sectors on chemical risk assessment approach. This article summarizes the learning that informs the needs concerning application of WoE, especially in the context of developing countries, to support use of existing data and test strategies for assessing chemical toxicity, exposure, and risk, and highlight the critical process for risk assessor to convey and discuss information sufficiency and uncertainty mitigation strategy with risk managers. This article complements the four IEAM series papers that provide a critical review of existing frameworks for chemical risk screening and management, and applications of WoE approach for assessing exposure in aquatic environment, prediction of fish toxicity and bioaccumulation (Moore et al., 2023, Miglino and Holmes, 2023, Belanger et al., 2023, and Arnot et al., 2023). Collectively, the article and papers exemplify the use of WoE approaches to evaluate chemicals that are data rich and/or data poor for decision making, integrating the WoE concepts and approaches into practical considerations and guidance, and helping to scale the value of WoE in supporting sound chemical risk assessment and science-based policy implementation.