ABSTRACT
The view that those applying the precautionary principle should take the distributional impacts into account is not one that is much expressed in existing formulations, guidelines and discussions of the precautionary principle. This can be seen by looking briefly at Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration (1992), the European Commission’s guidelines on applying the principle (European Commission, 2000), and the ‘Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle’ that was developed by a group of North American NGOs, academics and others (Raffensperger and Tickner, 1999).
