The principal purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the precautionary principle can be included in the investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) deliberative process by providing a legal ...solution that would permit the invocation and implementation of this concept within the ISDS operational framework. The precautionary principle has been widely applied in the environmental management field, yet its role within the ISDS framework has remained relatively underutilised. To analyse this issue, this paper first explores the operational justification of the precautionary principle and how decision-makers should endorse it in order to fully recognise and address environmental concerns on a legal level. Next, the article proceeds to examine recent ISDS cases in which the precautionary principle was invoked and compares various risk assessment techniques to illustrate how it may be incorporated into the deliberative process and harmonised with other standards. The paper suggests that the forward-looking nature of the precautionary principle has paramount importance in disputes involving oil and gas, particularly in cases where oil and gas activities are believed to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions that could worsen global warming. This paper advances the argument that a wider application of the principle could better equip ISDS tribunals to address the limitations of scientific knowledge, especially under circumstances where significant or irreversible environmental damage may occur.
The precautionary principle has been implemented in many fields including environment protection, biological diversity, and climate change. In the field of international nuclear safety regulation, ...the implementation of this principle is in an ongoing process. Since Japan declared to discharge Fukushima nuclear waste water into the ocean, the precautionary principle was put on the stage, and some debates are invoked on it. As is observed by this article, the precautionary principle has not been effectively implemented in nuclear safety regulation, specifically in nuclear safety law making, law enforcement, and judicial application. The reasons can be found from two main challenges: indeterminacy of perceived risk level required to justify precautionary action and hard balance of national interest and community interest in nuclear safety. In a long-term perspective, the framework of international nuclear safety regulation has to respond to these challenges, both by clarifying the precautionary principle in legal binding nuclear safety documents and moving towards a more transparent, fair, and effective enforcement regime in order to promote safer, more sustainable, and efficient civilian nuclear utilization around the world.
This Special Issue is designed to discuss and examine relevant legal issues concerning ocean governance in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the long-lasting ...benefits of the international community. It will cover, inter alia, the safety of navigation and maritime security, the sustainable use of marine resources (living and non-living), marine environmental protection, climate change, and marine scientific research.
While there is an extensive literature on how the precautionary principle should be interpreted and when precautions should be taken, relatively little discussion exists about the fair distribution ...of costs of taking precautions. We address this issue by proposing a general framework for deciding how costs of precautions should be shared, which consists of a series of default principles that are triggered according to desert, rights, and ability to pay. The framework is developed with close attention to the pragmatics of how distributions will affect actual behaviours. It is intended to help decision-makers think more systematically about distributional consequences of taking precautionary measures, thereby to improve decision-making. Two case studies—one about a ban on turtle fishing in Costa Rica, and one about a deep-sea mining project in Papua New Guinea—are given to show how the framework can be applied.
This article examines whether and how the practice of environmental impact assessments (EIAs) serves the idea of the precautionary principle. The article provides an empirical examination and ...description of how uncertainties and risks were dealt with in conclusive outputs of EIAs of chosen example cases of Finnish waste incineration projects. The analysis focuses on the time when several incineration projects were in the planning phase in Finland and the effects of this development were seen as being controversial. The findings of the analysis are evaluated against a legislative and theoretical framework. The challenges and strengths of the practice are identified. The article suggests that EIA as an environmental policy tool can promote the pursuit and the application of the precautionary principle. In addition, uncertainty analysis and risk communication in EIA could benefit from a shift towards more collaborative knowledge-making.
Several extraordinary rainfall events have occurred in Denmark within the last few years. For each event, problems in urban areas occurred as the capacity of the existing drainage systems were ...exceeded. Adaptation to climate change is necessary but also very challenging as urban drainage systems are characterized by long technical lifetimes and high, unrecoverable construction costs. One of the most important barriers for the initiation and implementation of the adaptation strategies is therefore the uncertainty when predicting the magnitude of the extreme rainfall in the future. This challenge is explored through the application and discussion of three different theoretical decision support strategies: the precautionary principle, the minimax strategy and Bayesian decision support. The reviewed decision support strategies all proved valuable for addressing the identified uncertainties, at best applied together as they all yield information that improved decision making and thus enabled more robust decisions.
The precautionary principle has provoked a spirited debate among environmentalists worldwide, but it is equally relevant to public health and shares much with primary prevention. Its central ...components are (1) taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; (2) shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; (3) exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and (4) increasing public participation in decision making. Precaution is relevant to public health, because it can help to prevent unintended consequences of well-intentioned public health interventions by ensuring a more thorough assessment of the problems and proposed solutions. It can also be a positive force for change. Three aspects are stressed: promoting the search for safer technologies, encouraging greater democracy and openness in public health policy, and stimulating reevaluation of the methods of public health science.
Cargo Cult Science Hanlon, Michael
European review (Chichester, England),
07/2013, Letnik:
21, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
There is plenty of stuff out there that looks like science, sounds like science and yet which is no more science than the ‘cargo cult’ aircraft and landing strips constructed by Pacific Islanders in ...the 1940s and 1950s were functional technology. My talk is not so much about the usual suspects – homeopathy, crystal healing, UFOs and the like – but other areas of cargo-cult science that sit far closer to the high altar of respectability. We take far too much for granted in science, and this can be seen in the replicability (or otherwise) of peer-reviewed studies, the phenomenon of publication bias, the so-called Decline Effect and the persistence of folk myths such as the one that describes how aeroplanes fly.
The precautionary principle asserts that the burden of proof for potentially harmful actions by industry or government rests on the assurance of safety and that when there are threats of serious ...damage, scientific uncertainty must be resolved in favor of prevention. Yet we in public health are sometimes guilty of not adhering to this principle. Examples of actions with unintended negative consequences include the addition of methyl tert-butyl ether to gasoline in the United States to decrease air pollution, the drilling of tube wells in Bangladesh to avoid surface water microbial contamination, and villagewide parenteral antischistosomiasis therapy in Egypt. Each of these actions had unintended negative consequences. Lessons include the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to public health and the value of risk-benefit analysis, of public health surveillance, and of a functioning tort system-all of which contribute to effective precautionary approaches.
I wish to caution against undue weight being given to received wisdom and false assumptions of ‘expertise’, particularly in the context of new epidemics. I argue that, in some cases, reliance on ...received wisdom can lead to poor decision-making in public health terms, whether we are talking about Mad Cow Disease, the likelihood of a novel strain of influenza causing many fatalities, or the best way to reduce overdose deaths soon after release from prison. I shall also stress the importance of well-designed data-acquisition which is, or should be, the forte of statistician-scientists.
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