Q: Risk assessment seems to say that it’s okay to cause cancer among a few people. Doesn’t Dow support preventing bad things from happening?

A: Dow supports taking precautionary action to protect human health and the environment.

Dow supports a precautionary approach as set out in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

The Rio Declaration was amended at the Johannesburg summit to include health impacts, in addition to environmental impacts.

Dow believes that measures should be risk-based and cost-effective. Additionally, the selected chemicals management measure should be:

• proportional to the objective being pursued
• provisional
• the least burdensome option that provides adequate protection from the risk