1. Mikael Hildén Finnish Environment Institute, SYKE
Thresholds and risks - tensions between policies and biological effects
Mikael Hildén
Finnish Environment Institute, SYKE

2. Starting points
Present EU policies demand harmonisation and preferably unambiguous limits, goals and measures;
Thresholds are entities that are related to sudden changes in biological and ecological systems;
Biological systems are characterised by variability and time-space specificity.

3. Effects of agreed policies: Intended; Unintended.
Political and scientific
debate:
Analysis of
thresholds
and their
consequences.
Political
negotiations
on policy
inter-
ventions
Agreement
on policy=
Specific
policies,
Directives
Observations
or fear
of sudden
change in
ecological
or biological
systems
Effects of
agreed policies:
Intended;
Unintended.
Feedback due to effects of agreed policies and interactions with other policies

4. Examples of references to proven or assumed thresholds in EU policy development
EU environmental policy has historically been driven strongly by health considerations.
In health risk management of chemicals, standards/guidelines have been based either on threshold models (trad. toxicol) or linear models (many carcinogens).
Ecological considerations have gained importance in policies, e.g.
Dangerous Substances Directive (1976);
Dioxin strategy (2001), however health focus in specific recommendations (for food and feeding-stuffs, 2002);
Integrated pollution prevention and control;
Marine Strategy (‘ecosystem approach’)
Water Framework Directive

5. Standards & thresholds
Quality standard = a legal expression of a threshold or an assumed threshold.
Relationship between standards and thresholds are complicated, because
Ecological thresholds are not constant entities;
Standards have to be constant in some bureaucratic /political time & space domain;
Economic, social and political factors affect the design of standard, including the degree of precaution adopted;
Legally binding quality standards must be translatable to specific places and cases.

6. The policy view on thresholds
Level of adverse impact
hysteresis
Toxicological
threshold of no effects
Observable
level
Risk averse
standards
Risk prone
standards
Pressure
Area of rapidly
increasing risk

7. Ways of dealing with thresholds in EU policy
Uniform standards (dioxins/chemicals/health);
Uniform procedures for:
Programmes maintaining/achieving desired states (Water Framework Directive)
Permits protecting local state of the environment (IPPC)
Environmental Quality Criteria / Objectives (EQCs) (partly unified)
Note: e.g. WFD & Marine strategy based on mixed approaches

8. side-effects of standards
Level of adverse impact
Social or economic effects
Observable
level
Pressure
Legally binding
standard = potential point of
discontinuity with respect to
social and economic effects

9. Implementation problems
The narrow ”discretisation” of great variety and the aggregation of dimensions (typology);
Risks and uncertainties with respect to thresholds are difficult to formalise; e.g., repeated safety factors in derivation of standard; selection of cut-off points in risk distributions.
The specification and application of multiple standards for multiple but non-separable risk agents, such as mixtures.
Economic, social and technical considerations cause tensions in the use of standards across EU.

10. Challenges
Avoiding unjustified cementing of thresholds into EU-wide or regional legal norms through standards or rigid procedures;
Development of procedures for providing information on and dealing with uncertainties concerning thresholds: finding reliable early signals – verification/falsification of the risks;
Adaptive management and policy learning for developing appropriate use of thresholds, in particular in the case of multiple risks = non-normative presentation of thresholds.