Environmental Health Risk Assessment and Management: Community Engagement for Water Reuse Technologies

While there is an emerging consensus among scholars, academic researchers, and environmental advocates that community engagement is essential for effective environmental health risk assessment and management, robust engagement does not occur often enough. To help promote community engagement in environmental health risk assessment and management, we provide rationales and approaches. We illustrate our points with a case study concerning water reuse, as water recycling technologies expand across the U.S. and the world to address water scarcity and increased water demand, considering a community engagement continuum framework. Formal environmental risk assessment has always had a required component for public notification to seek comments, but it is arguably not meaningful community engagement, as it is often done after the risk assessment is completed (without input) and in response to contamination without multi-directional community engagement. We show how effective multi-directional engagement of the community from the beginning of the risk assessment process can help to ensure that risk assessment and management are fair and effective. We also discuss some potential obstacles to effective community engagement concerning environmental health risk assessment and management and offer some recommendations for engineers, risk assessors, and policymakers.