Precautionary Principle

Precaution Defined

The precautionary principle emerged in the 1970s and was initially developed in Sweden and Germany, with a strong focus on environmental and health risks. The EU has had a series of food scandals over the past 10 years or so, ranging from salmonella in British eggs to dioxin in Belgian chicken feed, mad cow disease, tainted blood in France, and foot and mouth disease, making both consumers and regulators risk averse. This new environment has challenged the traditional risk-decision model based on expert knowledge. As a result, European regulators have tended to rely on precautionary action to regain public trust.

How can the precautionary principle be defined? It is commonly described as the attempt to act in the face of uncertainty to be “safe rather than sorry.” Beyond this general view, however, there is no single definition of the precautionary principle. One Swedish author, Per Sandin, has listed 19 different formulations of the precautionary principle, ranging from the requirement to act when we have indications that something might go wrong with a technology to cases where we expect industry to demonstrate that their products are entirely “safe” before releasing them in the market. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, however, contains the most commonly used definition, declaring that the precautionary approach should be applied to protect the environment wherever “serious or irreversible damage” is threatened and that “lack of full scientific certainty” should not be used to delay measures designed to protect the environment.

Another popular definition derives from an environmental meeting held in the United States in 1998 in Wisconsin; this version also asserts that action should be taken to control environmental and human health threats even in situations where the science is not fully established as yet. One of the more rigorous analyses of the meanings of the precautionary principle has been put forward in work by Jonathan B. Wiener and Michael D. Rogers. They argue that there are three different formulations of the precautionary principle.

...