Open assessment method

Open assessment (OA) R↻ is a description of a particular situation. It has been produced in the internet using a process where stakeholders and other people have been able to participate. They have been given an opportunity to comment and edit its contents already from an early phase of the process.

Structure of an open assessment

Variables

Variables are the basic building blocks of an open assessment. They describe some real-world things such as emissions of a pollutant, number of health effects due to a certain exposure in a population, or costs of a policy intervention. Variables are connected to each other with links that indicate a causal connection. The variables and the links together form a causal diagram that is the skeleton of an open assessment.

Some variables have a special meaning or purpose. Indicators are outcome variables that are the main interest of the open assessment, i.e. their values are the actual result of the open assessment. Policy options are variables that describe a group of possible actions such as installing (or not installing) a filter to the end of a smoke stack. All other variables are basically needed to estimate, how the policy options considered will affect the indicators. This information is then used in the subsequent decision-making.

Categories

Categories are used to manage the variables. Each variable can belong to one or more categories. Each category can also belong to one or more categories that are more general the itself. As an example, a variable Fine particle concentration in Helsinki belongs to a category Fine particles, which belongs to a category Air pollutants. Categories are used in the same way as in Wikipedia. However, there some specific categories that should be used systematically to categorise variables ORAs. Each variable shold belong to one of these categories, or their subcategories. The main categories are described below.

• Activities describe any human activity that result in releases of pollutants or other hazards into the environment.
• Releases describe releases of pollutants or other hazards into the environment.
• Pollutants describe what the pollutants or other hazards are. All variables that relate to a particular pollutant should be indexed with the category of that pollutant, and that category should be indexed to Pollutants.
• Concentrations in the environment describe
• Exposures
• Health effects exposure-reponse functions and health effects in humans.
• Costs and valuations describes value-laden summaries of health and other effects.