Kuopio workshop report

The report about the workshop, including outcomes, experiences, lessons learned, problems faced, development needs identified etc., will be written here. An intermediate report will be prepared for presentation at the SP1 meeting on 20 March in London and the final report will be prepared in the end of the workshop and presented at SP4 workshop on 16-17 April in Oslo. Perhaps the most relevant parts of the outcomes of the workshop should also be presneted in the SP3 meeting 28 March in Rome?

Intermediate report to SP1 meeting

The original idea of the workshop was to get people together to work on a particular risk assessment case using the available methods and tools within Intarese. Based on the experiences during the assessment work we were expected to increase our understanding of:

• what are all the relevant parts of integrated risk assessment?
• what are all the methods and tools that we have available within Intarese?
• what kind of methods and tools we are missing?

The role of the case study was thus intended more of an instrumental type - helping to concretize the discussions about the methods and tools. Naturally some expectations were also set for the actual outcome of the assessment itself, although already in advance it was considered a secondary goal.

What has actually happened so far is that the risk assessment case study on Schiphol airport has indeed helped us to direct the discussions to deal with the most important issues that require attention in light of integrated assessment method development. The progress of the assessment itself has not been very great. In fact quite early it already turned out that within the given time and resource limits we could apply the so called "quick and dirty" method if we were to get any real results out of the case study, but this would not probably be of much use considering the primary goals mentioned above. Instead we little by little shifted more and more towards conceptual-level discussions about phases of risk assessment and methods and tools available to carry them out. Several pages related to the case study have been created containing valuable information (see also the bottom of page), but for the time being the actual assessment is not proceeding at least until the feedback from SP1 meeting has been received. If a need to continue the assessment further and to more detail shall be expressed by SP1 meeting, we have the possibility to do that. If not, the remaining work efforts will be concentrated more on the conceptual considerations of the methodological framework.

Now, a little more than half-way through the workshop, the most significant outcomes clearly are the tables behind the link above. Despite still being draft versions, the tables could actually be considered as the so far most comprehensive attempt to describe the Intarese method and combining the contributions of different WP's of SP1 within one framework. Also the concept of assessment workspace was introduced as to describe the missing tool that would bind and integrate all the different more detailed methods and tools as well as users to the same "Intarese system". It must noted however, that the content of the assessment workspace -page is still a very early draft.

The main points of the above text can also be read in a more compact form from the e-mail from Jouni to Clive presented below.

Email to Clive 19.3.2007 at 12:30

Dear Clive,

I copy-pasted the wiki page "Tools needed in Intarese toolbox" on a Word file. In the meeting this morning, we decided that my talk tomorrow will focus on

• describing these tables as the major output of the workshop,
• telling that it is useful to divide things to
  • assessment-specific things (an extension of cross-cutting issues)
  • variable-specific things
  • step-specific things (that is things that relate to a particular step in the causal chain such as source, exposure etc)
• emphasizing that the major output of Intarese should be an assessment workspace, which is a working area where several assessors can work together, bring in information, and discuss it and synthesise it into risk assessments,
• emphasizing that we need already now a draft version of such an assessment workspace, and the only thing is available to our knowledge is Mediawiki. What the final workspace will be, can be decided later based on our and SP3's experiences.

Useful observations related to these tables:

• when we categorise things this way, we are able to place almost everything that has come to our minds into this framework.
• there are important gaps in the Intarese project that we noticed when looking at these tables: emission models and policy options (i.e. actions in DPSEEA) are missing.

Sincerely,

Jouni

Testing of Intarese methods and tools in noise policy case

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Click here to download original Analytica file

The noise policy case in the Schiphol assessment (see figure) tests and applies the selected Intarese methods and tools (see table). We start with the green and yellow variables, since there are data available. For each variable we describe the methods and tools needed and give an example/application of available methods and tools in the noise policy case.

Noise level distribution: Application in noise policy case

Original variable: Noise levels

Methods and tools needed

Development of noise level indicator

Methods and tools available:

• WHO indicator development methodology
  • Application in case:
  • Input to method: Noise level measurements
  • Output of method: Noise level indicator

Population distribution

Original variable: Exposed population

Methods and tools needed

Methods and tools available:

• • Application in case:
  • Input to method:
  • Output of method: Noise level indicator

Number of people exposed to certain noise levels: Application in noise policy case

Original variable: Noise exposure

Methods and tools needed

Noise exposure model

Methods and tools available:

• WP1.2 exposure models
  • Application in case:
  • Input to method:
  • Output of method:

Development of noise exposure indicator

Methods and tools available:

• WHO indicator development methodology
  • Application in case:
  • Input to method: None
  • Output of method: Noise exposure indicator (for example: Fraction of population with a given Lden of <55 dB(A), 55-60 dB(A), >60 dB(A))

Model to translate noise levels into sleep disturbance : Application in noise policy case

Original variable Sleep disturbance

Methods and tools needed

• WP1.3 methods of systemtic review/meta-analysis
  • Application in case:
  • Input to method: specific epidemiological studies dealing with noise and sleep disturbance
  • Output of method: One specific study/ model that can be best used to model noise related sleep disturbance. (For example: Miedema functions, see Sleep disturbance