Assessing and communicating risk with communities living on contaminated land

The U.K. government has emphasized redeveloping derelict land for housing. As a result, tools for assessing brownfield sites are well developed. However, there are many potentially contaminated sites on which people live, often not to the people's knowledge. For these situations, statutory guidance for risk communication is underdeveloped and, in certain situations, inadequate. This paper illustrates limitations of current methods using a heavily populated site where levels of specific contaminants exceed statutory limits. The authors describe how residents were involved in the site assessment process and how the process may be improved, and propose a framework to incorporate risk communication into the contaminated-land use strategy.