Abstract"Cumulative impacts" refers to the total harm to human health and the environment resulting from combinations of stressors over time. Cumulative impacts are creating three kinds of effects:degraded ecosystems (such as oceans and boreal forests), human diseases, and disproportionately burdened communities, which are the hallmark of environmental injustice. At the heart of the problem lie the modern risk-based regulatory systems of the U.S. and Europe, which are not designed to understand or manage cumulative impacts, and which have permitted an accumulation of harmful activities and effects. Alternative, precautionary regulatory approaches have been recommended but not yet widely implemented. Now some communities, planners and regulators are finding ways to supplement traditional risk-based approaches, using innovative new tools for assessment and decision-making in the face of cumulative impacts, including indexes, mapping, and screening. These efforts both inform policy and serve as exemplary models. Together they point the way toward new, precautionary decision structures aimed at reducing cumulative impacts.3
The precautionary principle has been incorporated as a belief statement in international agreements for more than a decade. The 1998 Wingspread definition of the principle was the first to bring together four components that, in the past two years, have formed the elements of a broader, overarching approach to precaution that is a robust basis for its specific implementation: prompt action even in the face of scientific uncertainty, burden of proof and persuasion on proponents of potentially hazardous technologies, assessment of alternatives, and transparency. This broad approach to precaution is in direct conflict with the simplistic, easily manipulated principles and methods of risk-assessment-based risk management being exported by U.S. officialdom. In contrast to risk assessment, precaution, broadly defined, incorporates the full range of human intelligence in the task of protecting human health and the environment: flexibility, foresight, fairness, thoughtful consideration, and honesty.
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