Potential role of health impact assessment within USEPA's Action Development Process

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) recently identified the integration of environmental justice into its programs and policies as a priority, including how it develops and evaluates environmental regulations. The Agency uses their Action Development Process (ADP) to examine and cultivate regulatory options and other actions in a step-wise fashion, and considers a wide array of information and employs a number of assessment tools to help predict their benefits and impacts. Agency's actions are rules, policy statements, risk assessments, guidance documents, models that may be used in future rulemakings, and strategies that are related to regulations. Health effects and costs are oftentimes incorporated into these analyses, highlighting an opportunity to focus attention on environmental health inequities. Risk assessment, for example, is a systematic analysis of health risk commonly utilized to inform regulatory development, but has been criticized for its limited scope and inability to adequately characterize the full breadth of risk that uniquely burden the most vulnerable and susceptible communities. Health impact assessment (HIA) can broaden the information considered by examining the impacts actions will have on social determinants of health in order to better characterize the distribution of impacts between socially and economically defined population groups and cumulative risk. The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of the potential benefits HIA can provide to the USEPA's ADP and the ways it may be integrated, and will highlight the strengths and attributes that differentiate it from other analysis tools currently included within the USEPA's repertory.