GEMET
General
Multilingual
Environmental
Thesaurus
precautionary principle
Definition

Principle adopted by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (1992) that in order to protect the environment, a precautionary approach should be widely applied, meaning that where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage to the environment, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

Other relations
Scope note

Scope note is not available.

Concept URL: http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet/concept/6623