OceanEarthSystems
Marine
This page contains two downloadable PDFs on Peter Taylor's previous marine pollution work which are referred to in Appendices 6.1 and 6.2.
The State of the Marine Environment: A Critique of the Work and Role of the Joint Group of Experts on Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution (GESAMP)
Peter Taylor
Abstract
The GESAMP reviews, The Health of the Oceans
(GESAMP, 1982) and the State of the Marine Environment (GESAMP, 1990), are the only global assessments of the state of the marine environment, and as such form an important basis for policy decisions both within the UN agencies, and at national level. Yet there are no critical reviews of this work in the scientific literature. In this article I shall summarize a number of concerns that I have articulated at greater length in a review prepared for Greenpeace and submitted to the London Dumping Convention in November 1991. The scientific aspects of that review were submitted in draft form and made available to GESAMP (Greenpeace,1992), who also agreed to a discussion with me on these issues at their meeting in Vienna in March of this year.
It was made clear that the group reject all of the
following criticisms, although they were open to constructive advice as to how to improve their work.
THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE AND THE PREVENTION OF MARINE POLLUTION
Tim Jackson and Peter J. Taylor
Abstract
This paper argues that the environmental changes witnessed in the past decade call for a new approach to environmental management; an approach based not on the principle of the assimilativa capacity of the environment but on the precautionary principle, and the emerging preventive environmental paradigm. Uncertainties in scientific knowledge and complexities in ecological systems have presented specific failures of the assimilative capacity methodology. It is argued that these failures are not circumstantial in nature, nor are they the result of misapplication of science by scientists. Rather, they represent inherent problems in the use, of the assiniilative capacity concept in environmental management. The emergence of the precautionary principle is discussed and a formulation of the principle is presented. In conjunction with the operational approach ot clean production, we believe that this principle otters a sounder basis for the prevention of marine pollution in the next decade.