Abstract
This paper offers a critical review of socio-economic analysis (SEA) in Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) restriction dossiers. We examine the conceptual setup of SEA and identify the methods used for impact assessment. Moreover, we analyse the outcomes of quantitative impact assessment across restriction dossiers and substance groups. We find that impact assessment has largely focused on economic and health impacts. Environmental, social, wider economic and distributional impacts have either been evaluated qualitatively or not at all. While this can be explained by the specific scope of the proposed restriction or by lacking data, we also observe a lack of approaches for environmental and health impact assessment. This underlines the need to develop integrated methods that transform information about chemical effects and risks into impacts and, ultimately, into benefits and damages. Furthermore, to strengthen the function of SEA as decision-support tool in REACH restriction procedures, a comparative SEA of at least two alternative restriction options should be the default.
Highlights
The ambition of the European chemicals’ legislation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Restriction of Chemicals) is to ensure ‘‘a high level of protection of human health and the environment, including promoting alternative methods for assessment of hazards of substances, while enhancing competitiveness and innovation’’ (European Commission 2006)
Restriction options that the dossier submitter considered inappropriate from the outset were not included in the analysis
Though our analysis did not reveal a clear relationship between the number of restriction options assessed and the quantitative outcomes of socioeconomic analysis (SEA) (Fig. 2), we find that dossiers providing a comparative evaluation of two, three, or more risk management options (RMOs) document large differences between the different restriction options for at least one outcome parameter (Table 3, columns 5–7)
Summary
Reversing the ‘burden of proof’, i.e. shifting the responsibility to provide relevant information about chemical properties, exposures and their (safe) use(s) from regulatory authorities to chemical producers, manufacturers and downstream users, has been considered a paradigm-change in European chemicals risk management (Hansen et al 2007; Beal and Deschamps 2016). Quantitative assessment of the short- and long-term impacts of REACH at the European level has not become available as yet, several studies have presented estimates of the expected environmental, cleanup, public and occupational health costs saved (cf Reihlen and Luskow 2007 for a survey)
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