Health Risk Assessment

Quick Facts

  • Sensitive receptor surveys at more than 650 sites over 4 years
  • Ecological risk assessments and natural resource damage claims for numerous high-profile projects
  • An estimated 25 percent of preventable illnesses worldwide can be attributed to poor environmental quality

Environmental protection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities.
- Representative Jim Clyburn, 6th District of South Carolina

The goal of environmental protection is to ensure the safety and well being of humans, animals, and plants. No project is complete without understanding health risk assessment. We believe that health risk drives every project. Whether it is pathway identification and mitigation, identifying the toxicity of the contamination, or statistical modeling, Sovereign offers full health risk assessment services.

Increasingly, the regulations that protect natural resources emphasize the need to reduce risks to the health of human lives and the environment. Our team performs human health and ecological risk assessments using EPA guidance and appropriate state regulations, employing a strategy that mandates an understanding of the site in a regional context. We measure biological effects in community assemblage information, tissue and body burden data, and biomarkers, as well as comparison to relevant reference and background settings.

We prepare risk assessments to support risk-based decisions under CERCLA, RCRA, and other programs. Sovereign’s risk assessment methodology distinguishes among possible site-related and off-site stressor sources and types to identify site-related risk and measure environmental impact. To support risk assessments, we establish a conceptual site model to ascertain potential media and receptors of concern, conduct a data evaluation, perform exposure assessments, complete toxicity assessments, characterize risks by receptor and pathway, and refine estimated risk by evaluating uncertainties.