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Implications for contaminated land risk assessment and risk management?
By Jonathan R Leake 1 , Andrew Adam-Bradford 2 and Janette E Rigby 3
1 Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
2 Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
3 National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Environmental Health
Published: 21 December 2009
Excerpts:
Abstract
Compelling evidence of major health benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption, physical activity, and outdoor interaction with 'greenspace' have emerged in the past decade – all of which combine to give major potential health benefits from 'grow-your-own' (GYO) in urban areas. However, neither current risk assessment models nor risk management strategies for GYO in allotments and gardens give any consideration to these health benefits, despite their potential often to more than fully compensate the risks. Although urban environments are more contaminated by heavy metals, arsenic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins than most rural agricultural areas, evidence is lacking for adverse health outcomes of GYO in UK urban areas.
Rarely do pollutants in GYO food exceed statutory limits set for commercial food, and few people obtain the majority of their food from GYO. In the UK, soil contamination thresholds triggering closure or remediation of allotment and garden sites are based on precautionary principles, generating 'scares' that may negatively impact public health disproportionately to the actual health risks of exposure to toxins through own-grown food. By contrast, the health benefits of GYO are a direct counterpoint to the escalating public health crisis of 'obesity and sloth' caused by eating an excess of saturated fats, inadequate consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables combined with a lack of exercise.
These are now amongst the most important preventable causes of illness and death. The health and wider societal benefits of 'grow-your-own' thus reveal a major limitation in current risk assessment methodologies which, in only considering risks, are unable to predict whether GYO on particular sites will, overall, have positive, negative, or no net effects on human health. This highlights a more general need for a new generation of risk assessment tools that also predict overall consequences for health to more effectively guide risk management in our increasingly risk-averse culture.
Conclusion
Growing your own food in urban areas has many potential health benefits which may positively improve the physical and psychological health of participants, and these health benefits may significantly offset or compensate for the apparently minor risks that follow from the higher loads of environmental pollutants in urban as compared to rural environments. The health benefits of GYO- which directly addresses some of the key national problems with diet and lifestyle- are likely to more than fully compensate risks at most sites that exceed current soil guideline values. This reveals a serious limitation in current risk assessment methodologies which, in only considering risks, are unable to assess to overall net effect of GYO on human health, and therefore may result in closure of sites that are providing significant overall health benefits to the GYO practitioners. This highlights the need to develop more sophisticated risk assessment tools that predict overall consequences for health from assessment of risk and benefits to health using a common metric and which can be built onto existing risk assessment tools such as CLEA. This will enable the individual and overall risks to health to be established to fully inform risk management decisions.
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