Testing of the Roadmap for Risk Assessment

To the participants of the discussion group on the Roadmap for risk assessment,

In earlier on line discussions you have provided us with your comments to previous draft versions of the Roadmap for Risk assessment. Your comments, as well as subsequent discussions in the AHTEG sub-working group on the Roadmap, have resulted in the new draft version of the Roadmap, of 8 November 2009, that is presented on this discussion site.

This draft will still need more amendments. The most efficient way to find out what amendments are necessary is to actually use the Roadmap for its purpose: to help a risk assessor in performing an LMO risk assessment. This is the purpose of the Testing of the Roadmap, that we kindly ask to do.

What we ask of you is to go through the process of an environmental risk assessment for an LMO using an actual case, and while you do this have the Roadmap side by side with the case of the LMO. In this way you may find out whether the Roadmap helps you to identify the stages of the risk assessment porocess,and whether it helps you to solve problems that you encounter, whether it is clear and easy to understand. For this exercise you may use any case of an LMO application that you have available, but in case you don’t have a case at hand, three case studies have been provided on the discussion site, that you may also use.

We want to point out that the questionnaire does not ask you to present your conclusion of the risk assessment. The case studies, or your own case study that you want to use, are just there to help you test the Roadmap. They show you what type of information you may be confronted with when you are doing an environmental risk assessment of an LMO.

We want to stress that this exercise may be done at different levels of detail. Depending on your experience with environmental risk assessment of LMOs, you may want to go more or less deeply into the questions. But, in all cases your comments are very valuable to us. Especially if you are less experienced, it is important for us to find out if this Roadmap is helpful for you, and how it may be improved to provide better guidance. Irrespective of your experience, you may spot flaws in the document that we have overlooked.

We hope that the questionnaire helps you to test the Roadmap in a structured way. But, you may also have comments that do not fit nicely in the framework of the questionnaire. Therefore I have also started a discussion thread where you may post such comments, separate from the questionnaire.

It must be clear that by doing this test and providing us with your answers is of enormous importance for the further development of the Roadmap,
We are very grateful for your efforts, and we thank you very much for taking the time to fill in the questionnaire! You may submit your questionnaires in the separate discussion thread that was started for that purpose.

For your convenience I have attached to this posting the draft Roadmap, version of 8 November 2009, as well as the Questionnaire on the Roadmap. These are the identical documents that are also available elsewhere on this discussion site.

Hans Bergmans, chair of the sub-working group on the Roadmap for risk assessment