The Precautionary Principle
and the Bay Area Working Group (The BAWG)
~ A Primer ~

“…when an activity raises threats to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken…” --1998 Wingspread Statement

What is the Precautionary Principle and what does it have to do with public planning?
The Precautionary Principle The Precautionary Principle has its roots in the environmental health movement of the late 80’s and 90s as an alternative to risk assessment as a decision-making tool. It is commonly referred to as a “first do no harm” approach.

The Precautionary Principle has five major tenets:

  1. Anticipatory Action: There is a duty to take anticipatory action to prevent harm.
  2. Right to Know: The community has a right to know complete and accurate information on potential human health and environmental impacts associated with the selection of products, services, operations or plans. The burden to supply this information lies with the proponent, not with the general public.
  3. Alternatives Assessment: An obligation exists to examine a full range of alternatives and select the alternative with the least potential impact on human health and the environment, including the alternative of doing nothing.
  4. Full Cost Accounting: When evaluating potential alternatives, there is a duty to consider all the reasonably foreseeable costs, including raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, use, cleanup, eventual disposal, and health costs.
  5. Participatory Decision Process: Decisions applying the Precautionary Principle must be transparent, participatory, and informed by the best available information.

Public Planning
What the Precautionary Principle has to do with public planning is that it provides guidelines intended to guarantee a safe and equitable planning process, a process that serves a broad community of interested people. To accomplish this, what is really called for is an affective and participative approach to public planning. This is really the only way to serve these principles.

Collaborative San Francsico
Thus, the precautionary principle provides the inspiration for Collaborative San Francisco in its focus on improving the way public decisions are made in San Francisco.

Precaution in San Francisco
The Breast Cancer Fund and Commonweal met in 1998 to discuss implementation of the Precautionary Principle in the Bay Area. This led to the formation of the Bay Area Working Group on the Precautionary Principle (BAWG), a coalition of more than a dozen environmental health and justice organizations, in 2001. The coalition decided to focus on passing precautionary legislation in San Francisco. This was done, first in the form of a resolution in 2002, then an ordinance in 2003 that established the Precautionary Principle as a policy of the City and County of San Francisco, the first city in the country to take such a step. The first specific application of Precaution took the form of a “green” purchasing ordinance, passed in 2005. Since that time, the City of Berkeley has adopted its own Precautionary Principle ordinance, with the active support of coalition members.

To learn more about the Bay Area Working Group and the Precautionary Principle, please visit our website at http://www.takingprecaution.org.