The precautionary principle is widely seen as fundamental to successful policies for sustainability. It has been cited in international courts and trade disputes between the USA and the EU, and invoked in a growing range of political debates. Understanding what it can and cannot achieve is therefore crucial. This volume looks back over the last century to examine the role the principle played or could have played, in a range of major and avoidable public disasters. From detailed investigation of how each disaster unfolded, what the impacts were and what measures were adopted, the authors draw lessons and establish criteria that could help to minimise the health and environmental risks of future technological, economic and policy innovations. This is an informative resource for all those from lawyers and policy-makers, to researchers and students needing to understand or apply the principle.

The precautionary principle is widely seen as fundamental to successful policies for sustainability. This title looks back over the last century to examine the role the principle played in a range of major and avoidable public disasters.

This study examines how the European Union has used the precautionary principle in legal decisions.

This book presents and defends an interpretation of the precautionary principle from the perspective of philosophy of science.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This challenging book takes a broad and thought-provoking look at the precautionary principle and its implementation, or potential implementation, in a number of fields. In particular, the essays within the book explore the challenges faced by public decision-making processes when applying the precautionary principle, including its role in risk management and risk assessment. Frameworks for improved decision making are considered, followed by a detailed analysis of prospective applications of the precautionary principle in a number of emerging fields including: nanotechnology, climate change.

This overview of the role played by the precautionary principle in international trade law, European law and national law compares how precautionary considerations have been applied in the fields of pesticide regulation and the regulation of base stations for mobile telephones in Sweden, the UK and the US. A number of problems in the current application of the precautionary principle are identified and discussed. For example, it is shown that a firm reliance on a wide and open-ended precautionary principle may lead to problems with the consistency, foreseeability, effectiveness and efficiency of measures intended to reduce environmental or health risks. It is suggested that the precautionary principle indeed may be an important tool, but that in order to be acceptable it must be coupled with strong requirements on the performance of risk assessments, cost/benefit analyses and risk trade-off analyses.