For offshore oil and gas production facilities, overboard disposal of treated produced water (PW) remains a principal waste management option, and regulatory frameworks have been established to manage these discharges. Risk-based assessment (RBA) of PW, which aims to quantify potential impacts on the environment, has been adopted in some regulatory systems, but is also applied by oil and gas operators as part of their risk management systems. In 2020, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers published a guidance document, including a four-tiered assessment framework aiming for a broader understanding and consistent application of PW RBA globally. The current study reviewed case studies and categorised them along the proposed assessment tiers. Regulatory developments are shown to be key drivers for the application of PW RBA globally, but required tools are often to resource intense for early risk screening. The proposed framework promotes the use of existing data, read-across techniques, and non-animal testing in two initial screening tiers, characterised by little to no sampling. In addition, it allows to refine higher tier assessments through the application of species sensitivity distributions and the inclusion of exposure time to avoid conservative assessment factors. This enables assessments to better approximate observations from field verification, included as a final tier to determine the level of discernible effects. The proposed tiered assessment approach can be considered a novel way to scale assessment efforts to the situation especially in cases where resources are limited, priorities for further investigations need to be set, rapid evaluation of hazard levels is required, sampling logistics and transport of large volumes is complicated and/or there is an opportunity for reduced animal testing. This makes early assessments more effective and ensures logical and efficient actions are triggered for understanding and managing environmental risks of produced water discharges.