Abstract
Chemicals bring large benefit to our daily life while they bring adverse effect to both human health and ecosystems. The conventional risk assessment or managements of the chemicals mainly aimed to reveal the adverse effects in human health and regulations of chemical usages were limited for human health. There has been an increasing tied for environments or ecosystems protection, and now it turns out that the regulation for chemical usage is required as a social demand. However, the history of the ecosystems protection from chemicals is so short that there are no well-agreed methodologies. There are a lot of problems to conduct the management in practice, and often the sources of the problems are even unknown. The purpose of the present paper is to classify such problems, and to show a new framework for the ecological risk assessment/management. Firstly, the risk statuses of heavy metals, zinc in particular, will be shown. Then problems of the current ecological risk assessment/management will be clearly pointed out. And finally, the possibility of the application of “adaptive management” to the ecological risk will be discussed.
