Risk assessment

is the central scientific component of risk analysis, developed primarily to support decision-making in the face of scientific uncertainty. It characterizes the potential adverse effects on human health resulting from exposure to hazards, and should be objective, unbiased, and soundly grounded in scientific data.

It consists of four interconnected steps: hazard identification, the recognition of the specific agent of concern; hazard characterization, which describes the nature and extent of adverse health effects and, where possible, establishes a dose-response relationship; exposure assessment, which estimates the amount of hazard consumed by the exposed population across the food production chain; and risk characterization, which integrates the outputs of the previous steps to generate an estimate of risk.

Risk assessment is an essential tool for generating the scientific evidence needed to inform effective and proportionate food safety decisions.