About the List

Choosing the Top Ten

The necessary process of prioritizing sites for remediation leads to debates about what makes one problem worse than another.

This Top Ten list was compiled with the inputs of Blacksmith’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB) of experts with over 250 years of combined experience in this field and including specialists from Johns Hopkins, Hunter College, Harvard University, IIT India, University of Idaho, Mt. Sinai Hospital, andleaders of major international environmental remediation companies. The Board reviewed a list of 35 sites, developed from the more than 300 that had been nominated from across the continents, collected in thepast six years of work by Blacksmith Institute.

The Board adopted a methodical approach to evaluating the 35 polluted sites so as to highlight the locations where human health is most at risk, and where children’s lives are especially threatened. Individual rankings from the Board members were collated, and the worst of the sites made the Top Ten list. In the end, it was agreed that identifying these ten was a significant achievement but that it was not realistic to put them into a final order from one to 10, given the wide range of location sizes, populations and other dynamics. Therefore, this report refrains from pointing the finger at just one place as being the worst on earth. Appearing on the final list of ten is bad enough.

The ranking in this report is not definitive and the nominations are almost certainly not comprehensive. Data on such places is hard to come by and Blacksmith Institute staff or Board members have not visited all of the nominated sites. We also acknowledge that the Top Ten list was finalized with a bias towards including point source and legacy issues. There was a consensus to include sites representative of certain types of pollutants, as well as sites that exemplify a common problem across the globe. More specifically, these selected sites illustrate the scope and scale of the problem, but unfortunately, are by no means isolated or unique.

The Selection Process

 In order to guide the selection process and the advice of the experts, a methodical approach was adopted. As described in Appendix 3, a simple scoring system was used by all members of the TAB in preparing individual lists of the worst ten. The scoring system takes into account the following selection criteria:

• The size of the affected population
• Severity of the toxin or toxins involved
• Impact of children’s health and development
• Evidence of a clear pathway of contamination
• Existing and reliable evidence of health impact

Different factors were accorded different weights, at the suggestion of the Technical Advisory Board. Given the lack of available data (and the difficulty of obtaining more) the experience and expert judgmentof the TAB members was essential in estimating scores for each site. Individual scores for the 35 sites on the were tabulated and this tabulation was then reviewed and discussed by the TAB as a whole, eventually arriving at a consensus on the Top Ten.

The Technical Advisory Board also decided to ensure that sites from all major regions of the developing world were included in the list. Some sites were also chosen because they highlight specific types of pollution that are to be found in many other locations. Air pollution in China, or lead poisoning from battery recycling are good examples.

The list is thus meant to be indicative of a broad range of pollution problems that cause serious harm to the poorest peoples of the world.