Overview of ICRP Committee 5

The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) established Committee 5 in 2005 in response to the need to provide direct demonstration of environmental protection from radiation in accordance with national law and international agreements. The development of the ICRP system for environmental protection was facilitated by research over the previous decades, as well as by ICRP's evaluation of the ethical and philosophical basis for environmental protection as laid out in ICRP Publication 91. The 2007 Recommendations (Publication 103) incorporated environmental protection as one of the integral elements of the radiation protection system. Over a relatively short time, the system has evolved to incorporate a set of 12 Reference Animals and Plants (RAPs), which is a small enough number to develop comprehensive databases for each RAP, but wide ranging enough to provide some insight into radiation impact and protection against such impact, as appropriate, in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. As necessary, the databases can be used to derive supplementary databases for Representative Organisms typical for a particular exposure situation of concern or under study. The system, to date, details biology of the RAPs (Publication 108); outlines transfer factors for estimation of internal concentrations of radionuclides of environmental significance under different situations (Publication 114); provides further information (Publication 108) on dosimetry, biological effects, and derived consideration reference levels (bands of environmental dose rates where potential detrimental effects may deserve attention); and provides information on application of the system in planned, emergency, and existing exposure situations (Publication 124). Currently, a review of experimental determinations of relative biological effectiveness, to guide derivation of specific weighting factors for use in environmental radiation protection if possible and necessary, is being concluded, as is work on improved dosimetry. Further work in this area involves consolidation of databases, recommendations for derivation of specific databases for Representative Organisms on the basis of the RAP data, and recommendations for application of the system to environmental protection in relation to certain human activities of potential environmental concern. Consideration needs to be made for the wider range of ecosystem effects that may be covered in ecological risk assessments, which incorporate the complete suite of stressors that result from human activity, and their effects, to understand the role of radiation effects in this context.