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Suppose you've just agreed to participate in a town hall panel discussion on biosolids at a local college. Your next thought probably is: "What did I just get myself into?" You know land application is a contentious issue and many communities have severely restricted biosolids use. You also know that prominent land-- application opponents will be participating and the audience probably will include more opponents who will attempt to control the dialogue. So, how will you make yourself heard?
The most effective method in such situations is risk communication, a science-based approach for communicating effectively in high-concern, sensitive, or controversial situations. Water quality professionals already know that many of their everyday issues - odors, biosolids, and water reuse, for example - are controversial. What is important to understand is that the risks that kill or harm people and the risks that alarm them are rarely the same. Risk communication addresses this dilemma. When a hazard is not serious but makes people mad, risk communication can be used to calm them down. On the other hand, risk communication can help generate a sense of urgency if data indicate that the hazard is serious, but public response is apathetic. It has been effective, for example, in motivating people to use seat belts, quit smoking, test buildings for radon, and evacuate their homes during emergencies.
Environmental risk communication techniques from scientific research were developed in the 1980s to help government and industry talk with the public about environmental policy-- making. During that decade, people reasserted their right to be involved in such decision-making processes and became upset and even outraged when they felt excluded. This new communication approach had to overcome several obstacles:
* inconsistent, overly complex, confusing, or incomplete risk messages;
* lack of trust in information sources;
* selective reporting by the news media; and
* psychological and social factors that affect how information is processed.
The resulting seven principles of risk communication (also called the Seven Cardinal Rules of Risk Communication) first were adopted by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1980s as a response to Superfund-related questions. The following rules have been widely reproduced and quoted and are considered a "behavioral code" for environmental professionals who need to interact effectively with...