The precautionary principle and scientific expertise

The community must be able to take risks and innovate, but at the same time it must be able to adopt safeguards and set up collective mechanisms to support action, which must then be conceived and managed as an experiment. The precautionary principle does not reject action, but changes the terms under which it is undertaken.

Risk analysis should precede rather than follow crises. It must evolve in line with new data. Consequently, it requires in-depth, ongoing expertise.

• Multidisciplinary, adversarial expertise

  Uncertainty is not synonymous with a lack of knowledge. On the contrary, we need to gather as much data as possible. However, each expert only holds a segment of what needs to be reconstructed as a whole. That's why multidisciplinarity is essential. It is the only way to reconstruct...