The Precautionary Principle is intended to protect human health and the environment. To serve these goals effectively, precautionary action must be coupled with concurrent research to decide whether the action taken is in fact protective.

The precautionary principle states that serious environmental threats and health hazards should be anticipated and that they ought to be forestalled before the realisation of damage even if scientific understanding of the risks is inadequate. Although the principle is a subject of intense debate and academic scrutiny, its normative underpinnings have received surprisingly exiguous attention. In...

Public authorities often invoke the precautionary principle to ban or postpone the development of innovative projects with uncertain but potentially harmful irreversible impacts on the environment or health. As stated in the Rio declaration, the precautionary principle suggests balancing costs and benefits associated with irreversible decisions while taking account of the perspective to acquire...