CRASSH

Human health risks attributable to groundwater arsenic in southern Asia: models, perception and action in the light of Beck’s Risk Society

The extensive use for drinking, irrigation and cooking of arsenic-bearing groundwaters in many circum-Himalayan countries, including India, as well as many other parts of the world, is widely recognised as the cause of one the most serious environmental health disasters of our time. We outline a probabilistic risk assessment model to assess these risks attributable to groundwater arsenic quantitatively, and highlight key areas of model and parameter uncertainty. We further outline how some institutional and individual responses to the arsenic crisis reflect a paradox of Beck’s (1992) Risk Society: that modern societies have a tendency to actions driven by a need to evaluate the risks arising from human technologies and interventions whilst, at the same time, society-generated “mega-hazards” may often be neither attributable nor manageable.