Risk management involves analyzing various risks and their tradeoffs to balance social, economic, and environmental objectives. This article reviews the research history and core terms of risk tradeoffs. It also explores the nature of risk tradeoffs in the context of interlinkage research, and proposes a typology of risk tradeoffs and conceptual framework for risk tradeoff analysis.

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Risk management involves analyzing various risks and their tradeoffs to balance social, economic, and environmental objectives. On the basis of the conceptual framework described in the previous paper of this series, this paper critically reviews the methods available for risk tradeoff analysis. The author proposes to develop not only a database of risk tradeoff events and studies, but also a set of tools to support risk tradeoff analysis.

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The health risk due to the exposure to hazardous chemicals in the environment has been traditionally evaluated mainly based on the dose-response relationship determined for human, including the relationship of test animals with appropriate safety factor. However our daily life faces to so many varieties of hazardous chemicals that have not enough toxicity information for health risk evaluation. Here, a new challenge for health risk evaluation framework is proposed to reinforce the traditional framework with the sequential three models: (1) the PBPK model to convert the external exposure dose of chemicals into the internal dose in the target organ/tissue, (2) the dose-response relationship determined at cellular level of the target organ/tissue, and (3) the adverse effect-developing model to convert the change in cellular level into the somatic health risk, e. g., a mathematical cancer model. The expected contribution and utilities of the new framework are also discussed together with the modified framework to use the radiation equivalent dose of chemicals.
The new framework, combined with the traditional, is highly expected as an effective and comprehensive health risk evaluation framework especially for new hazardous chemicals in our living environment.

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This study investigated public concern about a variety of hazards in Japan. Two thousand two hundred adults were selected from the residents' basic registers using a stratified two-step random sampling method. One thousand three hundred and ninety-three of them rated their concern toward fifty-one kinds of hazards on six-point scales were utilized for their rating. A factor analysis extracted seven factors. A consequent analysis of variance revealed that people were most concerned about hazards that highly loaded on a “global crises of environment” factor, followed by a “major cause of death” hazards. Well-known disasters and accidents were of low concern. The results also revealed that public's concern about hazards reduced when they had guessed the number of deaths by each hazard. Implications and limitations of the present results were discussed.

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Following the agreement reached at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, risk-based chemicals management is now introduced worldwide. However, there are very little data available for human health risk assessment in many cases. In this paper, we examined a mathematical modeling approach to estimating site-specific intakes of Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) via agricultural and livestock products, including uncertainty analysis of model estimates. Although the estimated intakes agreed with the measured values in same order of magnitude, further works such as development of concentration correction factors and analysis on distribution channels will be required in order to apply this approach to site-specific exposure assessment of other hydrophobic chemicals via oral route.

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