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Fifth Session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee
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United States Position on Precaution The United States believes firmly in a context-specific precautionary approach to protect human health and the environment. Precaution is an essential element of the U.S. regulatory system as regulators often have to act on the frontiers of knowledge and in the absence of full scientific certainty. The United States has supported the appropriate use of precaution in a number of international agreements and has been using such approaches since the early 1900s in domestic legislation, policies, and practices. Yet precaution must be exercised as part of a science-based approach to regulation, and not as a substitute for such an approach. The negotiation of a POPs treaty itself is an exercise of precaution. While there is not yet full scientific certainty about all aspects of POPs, the United States, along with the rest of the global community, believes that POPs present serious risks to the environment and should be addressed through a multilateral environmental agreement. The UNEP mandate for these negotiations instructs countries to address 12 POPs and, in addition, requires countries to act in a precautionary manner by developing criteria and procedures for adding new chemicals in the future. Like most other countries in the world, the United States supports Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which states: Given the wide-spread recognition and international agreement on Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration, the United States has advocated its inclusion in the Preamble to the POPs Treaty as a way to reaffirm the relationship between the science-based approach of Principle 15 and the POPs treaty. We are therefore supportive of the reference in the Preamble of the Chair's text to address the important role that precaution plays in this treaty.In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. The United States believes that precaution is also reflected in a practical and context-specific way in other provisions of the treaty. For example, negotiators have agreed on screening criteria for Annex D that take into account the fact that there is often a lack of data regarding persistence, bio-accumulation, the potential for long-range transport, and toxicity. Further, the U.S. has supported language that would apply those criteria in a flexible manner, so that the criteria can be met in more than one way in order to provide an additional precautionary measure to ensure an effective and integrative process. Additional references to precaution or references to a lack of scientific certainty could undermine the science-based approach developed by the Criteria Expert Group and already agreed upon by the negotiators. Such proposed references also appear to be an attempt to renegotiate the terms of Rio Principle 15 in this negotiation, an effort that the United States finds inappropriate in the POPs negotiations. [end of document]
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