Separating Variability and Uncertainty in Environmental Risk Assessment—Making Choices

This article reviews some of the current guidance concerning the separation of variability and uncertainty in presenting the results of human health and ecological risk assessments. Such guidance and some of the published examples of its implementation using two-stage Monte Carlo simulation methods have not emphasized the fact that there is considerable judgment involved in determining which input parameters can be modeled as purely variable or purely uncertain, and which require explicit treatment in both dimensions. Failure to discuss these choices leads to confusion and misunderstanding of the proposed methods. We conclude with an example illustrating some of the reasoning and statistical calculations that might be used to inform such choices.