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The public should be more closely involved in setting local and national environmental standards if these are to be widely accepted, according to Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

In a report published last week, the commission is reluctant to make specific recommendations about how this should be achieved. But it stresses the general need for a “new approach to policy-making”.

The commission is chaired by Sir Tom Blundell, head of the department of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and former chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Its report, Setting Environmental Standards, argues that both scientific evidence and social values need to be used in setting environmental standards. In the past, it says, the neglect of values and non-scientific opinions has resulted in poor public acceptance of environmental policies.

The report stresses that scientific assessments of environmental issues remain an important basis for decision-makers. But it says that such assessments should present a range of possibilities for action, rather than a single option.

“Scientists should not usurp the policy-maker's role,” says Clair Chilvers, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Royal Commission. Chilvers points out that in many cases, such as the disposal of the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea or the propagation of genetically modified crops, scientific assessment on its own failed to provide a firm basis for policy decisions, partly because it contained many uncertainties.

Decision-makers should recognize that the “requirement for sound science as the basis for environmental policy is not the requirement for absolute knowledge”, says the report. They should also accept that there are bound to be “limitations and uncertainties” at each stage of a scientific assessment of an environmental issue.

In addition to the traditional procedure of direct, science-based, government regulation of environmental issues, new instruments should be introduced. The commission says these could include negotiated agreements between governments and industries or companies, and economic instruments, such as green taxes or charges.

To ensure that people's values, attitudes and opinions are adequately taken into account, the commission recommends that new methods should be added to the “relatively technocratic procedures” of setting environmental standards. These might include community forums, citizens' juries and consensus conferences.

The commission recommends that the UK Department of the Environment should incorporate such methods into the procedures for considering environmental issues and setting standards. The use of new methods for determining public values should also be “high on the agenda” for European institutions, says the report.