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

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. 25.2.2019

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 25.2.2019

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 25.2.2019

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. 25.2.2019

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 25.2.2019

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 25.2.2019

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 25.2.2019

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. 25.2.2019

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. 25.2.2019