Precautionary information-generation in science and the law
Cranor, C.
Water Science and Technology a Journal of the International Association on Water Pollution Research 52(6): 65-71
2005
ISSN/ISBN: 0273-1223 PMID: 16304936 Document Number: 588487
An information-generation system should be part of precautionary approaches to protecting the public's health and the environment. Such a system would include inventories or surveys of health and the environment, monitoring of them, as well as scoping out or scouting for threats or other harmful things that could occur and providing sentinels to try to identify threats before they materialize. I, then, suggest some ways in which such strategies could be adopted in science and the law as part of a precautionary approach. Doing more to generate information in an anticipatory way will assist implementation of the precautionary principle and help remove some of the uncertainty in environmental and public health protections.