HEROIC - an integrated European approach to the coordination of human and environmental risk assessment

While the integration of human and environmental risk assessment (RA) has been discussed and promoted for more than a decade, existing European regulations of chemical substances such as REACH, the Plant Protection Products and Biocide Regulations continue to ask for sector-specific RAs, each of which have their specific information requirements and use different methodologies for the ultimate risk quantification. In response to this gap between the vision for integration and current scientific and regulatory practice, the EU FP7 project HEROIC aims to contribute to the development of harmonised approaches which meet the challenges of RA. A comprehensive landscaping exercise has identified common methodological and data needs and opportunities in current human and environmental RA practices (Péry et al., 2013). Existing in vivo, in vitro and in silico methods for hazard and exposure assessment will be evaluated based on their reliability and relevance and using a Weight-of-Evidence approach to develop an Integrated Testing Strategy (ITS) for decision making. A dedicated web portal (“Tox-Hub”) that presents information from diverse sources as a central point of access to the most relevant toxicological and ecotoxicological information is being developed. A further focus is on ways to complement RA with a socio-economic assessment (SEA) in order to better inform about risk management options. A diverse range of dedicated activities is planned for information, dissemination, capacity building and communication of the project. These coordinating activities will result in enhanced sharing of knowledge, building consensus and contribute to the development of clear, easily understood, transparent and unambiguous integrated RA procedures.