The Precautionary Principle: A taxpayers' revolt

Ellis, Derek

doi:10.1016/0025-326x(93)90605-j

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In contrast, Stebbing [40] argues that the Precautionary Principle is not a viable alternative to the use of environmental (i.e., assimilation) capacity validated by monitoring. The Precautionary Principle has also been extensively criticized for marginalizing the role of science [41–43]. For example, many jurisdictions have concluded that any substance that is persistent, toxic, and liable to bioaccumulate should be eliminated or minimized, ignoring realities such as the facts that all substances are toxic at some concentration, that all elements are (by their very nature) persistent, and that some substances need to be bioaccumulated to sustain the health of organisms [44,45].…”

Section: Origin and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A critical evaluation of safety (uncertainty) factors for ecological risk assessment

Chapman¹,

Fairbrother

Brown³

1998

Enviro Toxic and Chemistry

299

164

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Evaluation of environmental risks posed by potentially hazardous substances requires achieving a balance between over‐ and underprotection, i.e., between societal benefits posed by the use of particular substances and their potential risks. Uncertainty (e.g., only laboratory data may be available, field or epidemiological data may be limited and less than clear‐cut, etc.) will always exist and is often conservatively dealt with by the use of so‐called “safety” or “uncertainty” factors, some of which remain relatively little changed since their origin in 1945. Extrapolations involving safety factors for both aquatic and terrestrialenvironments include inter‐ and intraspecies, acute‐to‐chronic, lowest‐ to no‐observed‐effect concentration (NOEC), and laboratory‐to‐field extrapolation (e.g., extrapolation of laboratory results to the field). To be realistic, such extrapolations need to have a clear relationship with the field effect of concern and to be based on good science. The end result is, in any case, simply an estimate of a field NOEC, not an actual NOEC. Science‐based versus policy‐driven safety factors, including their uses and limitations, are critically examined in the context of national and international legislation on risk assessment. Key recommendations include providing safety factors as a potential threshold effects range instead of a discrete number and using experimental results rather than defaulting to safety factors to compensate for lack of information. This latter recommendation has the additional value of rendering safety factors predictive rather than simply protective. We also consider the so‐called “Precautionary Principle”, which originated in 1980 and effectively addresses risk by proposing that the safety factor should be infinitely large.

show abstract

Section: Origin and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%