Edited by Tim O'Riordan and
James Cameron
Earthscan Publications Ltd, 1994. ISBN 1-85383-200-6
120 Pentonville Road,
London N1 9JN
Definitions of the precautionary principle
As Sonja Boehmer Christiansen points out in the chapter that
follows, the precautionary principle evolved out of the German socio-legal
tradition, created in the heyday of democratic socialism in the 1930s,
centering on the concept of good household management. This was regarded as a
constructive partnership between the individual, the economy and the state to
manage change so as to improve the lot of both society and the natural world
upon which it depended for survival. This invested the precautionary principle
with a managerial or programmable quality, a purposeful role in guiding future
political and regulatory action.
As Boehmer Christiansen argues, the German concept of Vorsorgeprinzip
means much more than the rough English translation of foresight planning. It
absorbs notions of risk prevention, cost effectiveness but in a looser economic
framework, ethical responsibilities towards maintaining the integrity of
natural systems, and the fallibility of human understanding. The right of
nature means, in part, giving it room to accommodate to human interference, so
precaution presumes that mistakes can be made. For the Germans, therefore,
precaution is an interventionist measure, a justification of state involvement
in the day to day lives of its lander and its citizenry in the name of good
government. Social planning in the economy, in technology, in morality and in
social initiatives all can be justified by a loose and open ended interpretation
of precaution. As we shall see, it is precisely the unravellability that makes
precaution both feared and welcomed.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s these notions of
care and wise practice have been extended to six basic concepts now enshrined
in the precautionary principle.
Preventative
anticipation: a willingness to take action in advance of scientific proof of
evidence of the need for the proposed action on the grounds that further delay
will prove ultimately most costly to society and nature, and, in the longer
term, selfish and unfair to future generations.
Safeguarding of
ecological space or environmental room for manoeuvre as a recognition that
margins of tolerance should not even be approached, let alone breached. This is
sometimes known as widening the assimilative capacity of natural systems by
deliberately holding back from possible but undesirable resource use.
Proportionality of
response or cost-effectiveness of margins of error to show that the selected degree
of restraint is not unduly costly. This introduces a bias to conventional cost
benefit analysis to include a weighting function of ignorance, and for the
likely greater dangers for future generations if life support capacities are
undermined when such risks could consciously be avoided.
Duty of care, or
onus of proof on those who propose change: this raises profound questions over
the degree of freedom to take calculated risks, thereby to innovate, and to
compensate for possible losses by building in ameliorative measures. Formal
duties of environmental care, coupled to an extension of strict liability for
any damage, no matter how unanticipated, could throttle invention, imagination
and growth. Alternatively, when creatively deployed such strictures could
encourage imagination and creativity in technology, economic valuation,
technological advance and unusual forms of ameliorative compensation. Hence the
concept of proportionality can be regarded either as a deadweight or a
touchstone for the visionary.
Promoting the cause
of intrinsic natural rights: the legal notion of ecological harm is being
widened to include the need to allow natural processes to function in such a
manner as to maintain the essential support for all life on earth. The application
of ecological buffers in future management gives a practical emphasis to the
thorny ethical concept of intrinsic natural rights.
Paying for past
ecological debt: precaution is essentially forward looking but there are those
who recognize that in the application of care, burden sharing, ecologically
buffered cost effectiveness and shifting the burden of proof, there ought to be
a penalty for not being cautious or caring in the past. This suggests that
those who have created a large ecological burden already should be more
"precautious" than those whose ecological footprints have to date
been lighter. In a sense this is precaution put into reverse: compensating for
past errors of judgment based on ignorance or an unwillingness to shoulder an
unclearly stated sense of responsibility for the future. This element of the
principle is still embryonic in law and practice, but the notion of
"common but differentiated responsibility" enshrined in the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the concept of conducting
precaution "according to capabilities" as laid down in principle 15
of the Rio Declaration reflect to some extent these ideas.
By no means all of these interpretations are formally
approved in international law and common practice. At present the line is to
act prudently when there is sufficient scientific evidence and where action can
be justified on reasonable judgments of cost effectiveness and where inaction
could lead to potential irreversibility or demonstrate harm to the defenders
and future generations. In substance, the application is usually derived for
chemicals whose effects are potentially toxic, persistent or bioaccumulative
(i.e. concentrating in the food chain from one predator to another), or where
certain combinations or concentrations of chemicals could alter the physical
and chemical state of soil or water. In this sense the notion in international
affairs is mostly one of prevention, and justification of some action rather
than to claim scientific uncertainty as a reason for delay.
Let us put precaution into both the sustainability
perspective and that of proportionality, or economic-societal justification of
possible adverse costs in favour of taking care. On the sustainability front,
economists like to speak of weak and strong sustainability as a major
distinction, with very weak and very strong variants on either side. The most
accessible reference is Turner (1993). Very weak sustainability is based on the
presumption that losses of environmental resources (natural capital) can be
made up by innovation, ingenuity, imagination and adaptation. In Figure 1.1
rising damage costs spurs an interest in damage avoiding market prices,
regulatory behavior and technological substitution. Precaution has a place,
mostly as a spur to innovation and managerial adaptation. So the line of
precautionary action lies towards the upper left of the diagram, namely where
the threat of irreversible damage is palpable, and the benefits of intervention
are clear.
Weak sustainability places more emphasis on extended cost
benefit analysis, that is in introducing firmer measures of the value of
safeguarding ecological and biogeochemical processes that are irrecoverable if
lost. These processes and their associated species mix are referred to as
critical natural capital. The distinction between weak and strong
sustainability lies in the degree to which the precautionary principle and its
economic interpretation is applied to ensuring the protection of critical
natural capital, including the creation of new critical capital by deliberate
management. Note here that the curve of safeguard tends move towards the right,
i.e. to ensure that plenty of life support systems remain intact. Both models
of sustainability take a more sanguine view of inbuilt resilience of natural
systems.
Very strong sustainability favours a more fundamentalist
mode of ecological solidarity with the earth. Here the line is to adapt to the
frames set by natural systems, and to build precaution into an approach to
living that is altogether more in empathy with the natural world. The amount of
"ecological footprint" becomes progressively lighter, and the
precautionary line drops to the lower right hand zone of the diagram, being
triggered at the point of relatively little damage. Here, the bias of
"proporationally" favours early action in the face of pessimism over
the ability of the earth to cope with human intervention for the survival of
the human species. [p.p. 16 20]