THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE PROJECT
ONLINE CONSULTATION
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From: Martin Sharman
Affiliation: European Commission
Remote Name: psbru.cec.eu.int
Time: 14:51:48 +0100
This is essentially a definition of the precationary principle, and in my view an unworkable one. It is unrealistic to hope that society will in general behave as though the environment were sacrosanct. We simply have to exploit to survive, so such a "don't touch" policy can't be applied. I'm completely new to this debate, so perhaps my questions have been discussed and answered a million times before. But in my view there is also a problem about how to define "no significant harm". Is the extinction of a species "significant harm" if we have no idea what role the species plays in the ecosystem? And what "positive benefits" could counterbalance such an extinction? What metric would you use? Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration largely avoids these problems. It says "to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied... Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation". As you may know, 5 years ago the European Commission published a Communication on the precautionary principle (http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/health_consumer/library/pub/pub07_en.pdf that goes into considerable and careful detail on this issue of using the principle in decision making. I think that the ideas contained in this document are worth consideration, even for people and organisations outside the European Union.
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