PARENT SESSION

5B a - RA/ Ranking and Chemical Specific
Poster Hall
8:30 AM - Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Chair: Loonen, H.¹, ¹
Co-chair: McCarty, L.², ²

(TUP/211) Ethics and science in ecological risk assessment.

Evans, Jens¹, Wood, Graham¹, Miller, Anne¹, ¹ Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England, UK

ABSTRACT- Good scientific understanding is essential to the development of sound environmental management policy, and ecological risk assessment has become established as the preferred analytical tool for formulating scientific evidence concerning ecological risks. However, risk management is ultimately a public policy choice and scientific facts alone are not an adequate basis for policy development, which also requires consideration of ethical values. To promote transparency, it is generally desirable to distinguish the factual and political bases of policy development. This is achieved in regulatory practice by separating the processes of risk assessment and risk management, on the assumption that risk assessment is a predominantly scientific and objective exercise, free of policy choices. However, this assumption is challenged by current thinking that views ecological risk as characterised by high levels of technical uncertainty and high decision stakes. In such circumstances, important elements of risk assessment become normative rather than objective, necessarily requiring value judgements to be made in the assessment. The traditional rationale that values can be excluded from ecological risk assessment is no longer appropriate in this context. This study has identified three types of value judgement inherent to ecological risk assessment: defining ecological adversity, choosing the burden of proof and deciding sufficiency of proof. These are ethical choices, implying a preference on the part of the analyst about the acceptability of risk and the desired ecological state of the environment. The existence of ethical choices in ecological risk assessment refutes the notion that the process is fundamentally objective or value-neutral, suggesting that the factual and political bases for policy development cannot be distinguished fully. Furthermore, this raises the possibility that risk assessments may be inherently predisposed to certain policy choices.

Key words: values, ethics, risk assessment, risk management