![]() Precautionary approaches are goal and alternatives oriented, lending themselves to technology innovation, pollution prevention, and impact assessment. Policies based on the Principle are preventive, whereas those based on current decision-making approaches tend to focus on pollution control and remediation. Current risk-based decision-making approaches ask questions such as: "How safe is safe" "What level of risk is acceptable" and "How much contamination can a human (usually a healthy adult male) or ecosystem assimilate without showing any obvious adverse effects?" The Precautionary Principle asks a different set of questions such as: "How much contamination can be avoided while still maintaining necessary values?" "What are the alternatives to this activity that achieve a desired goal (a service, product, etc.)?" and "Do we need this activity in the first place?"Ĭhanging the questions we ask about a problem (the problem definition) leads to a totally different set of public policies. First, the Precautionary Principle forces scientists and policy decision makers to begin to ask a different set of questions about activities and potential hazards. The Precautionary Principle requires a fundamental change in three critical aspects of current environmental health decision-making: (1) it switches the questions asked when making decisions under scientific uncertainty (2) it switches the presumptions about the harm of a particular activity, action or substance (3) it switches how decisions are made about risk and who is involved in the decision-making process. ![]() They require honesty about uncertainty, what is known, not known, and can be scientifically determined. Decisions to invoke the precautionary principle involve different types of scientific knowledge from different fields. The precautionary principle requires more, not less science than traditional decision-making methods. ![]() It is about the best possible science for the best possible decisions that prevent harm to human health or the environment. Precaution is about anticipating (the Precautionary Principle comes form the German Vorsorge, or foresight,principle) and preventing environmental health damage. The Precautionary Principle comes into play when there may be environmental or health damage and there is uncertainty as to whether the effect has or will occur and its potential magnitude. This briefing paper presents an overview of the Precautionary Principle and some components of a structure to implement the Principle in environmental health policy. By The Massachusetts Precautionary Principle Project ![]()
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