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• Precautionary Principle
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The Precautionary Principle

"where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation." (National ESD Strategy)

Precautionary policies
Reactive Policies
Anticipatory Policies
Assimilative Capacity

Precautionary policies

The ESD Working Group Chairs (1992b, p. 41) recognise the need to deal cautiously with risk and uncertainty. They quote a British government paper which states that:

"Where the state of our planet is at stake, the risks can be so high and the costs of corrective action so great, that prevention is better and cheaper than cure … Where there are significant risks of damage to the environment, the Government will be prepared to take precautionary action to limit the use of potentially dangerous materials or the spread of potentially dangerous pollutants, even where scientific knowledge is not conclusive, if the balance of likely costs and benefits justifies it."

The ESD chairs say that if there are likely to be irreversible consequences, development should only take place 'where substantial social benefits would be lost were it not to proceed'&emdash;thereby shifting the burden of proof from the environment to the development. They suggest this could be done by altering cost&endash;benefit calculations to take account of uncertainties and irreversibilities: for example, by including conservation benefits forgone in the cost of the project or by applying a safety margin to such calculations. In this way, they argue that not only would 'explicit allowance' be made for 'potentially catastrophic risks' but economic costs would also be considered (p. 42).

Although the Pearce Report argues that 'doing nothing' may be justified if the cost of action is high and it may be possible to come up with more cost-effective solutions later, 'a society committed to sustainable development will shift the focus of its environmental policy towards an anticipatory stance, especially as reactive policy risks shifting the burden of environmental risks to future generations' (p. 19).

The International Chamber of Commerce, which has many of the world's largest companies as members, has also declared its support for the 'precautionary approach'. This means that its members are obliged to change their activities 'to prevent serious or irreversible environmental degradation' (ESD Working Group Chairs 1992, p. 41). Indeed, the precautionary principle has been endorsed by the United Nations Environment Programme and the European Community Parliament.

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Reactive Policies

It may be preferable to postpone acting on a problem, and incur the costs of fixing it up later rather than now, because:

• Future costs are perceived to be less burdensome than current costs.
• If good scientific research accompanies the delay, the extra information might enable the problem to be solved in a cheaper and more effective way.

This approach is a 'reactive' approach. A reactive approach to development therefore tends to burden future generations with environmental risks and to rely on technological solutions to future problems.

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Anticipatory Policies

The Pearce Report (1989) examines the issue of whether policies should be anticipatory from an economic point of view. Postponing action might not be the best decision because, according to the Pearce Report:

• It may cost more to solve a problem in the future than it does to solve it now, particularly if damage done in the ensuing time is irreversible. This extra cost could outweigh the effect of time preference.
• Sustainable development requires that the future is compensated for environmental damage; this would also increase the cost of inaction.
• Environmental problems are accompanied by a great deal of uncertainty. People tend to be risk-averse&emdash;that is, they tend to play it safe if the consequences of not acting are likely to be large and undesirable.

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