Menu
NCSE Conference is an event focused on science and the environment. We help explain the role of science in environmental protection.
Science plays an essential role in enacting, deploying and enforcing environmental law. Many statutes are enacted based on risk or health, technology and science standards.
Regulatory discourse is also based on probabilities, science and assessment of risks. However, the interdisciplinary nature of these issues raise various social, legal, ethical and economic concerns.
Various aspects of governmental policy related to safety, health and environmental hazards have increasingly become contentious over the years.
Today, the debate on regulatory reform continues and hasn’t attained consensus on government procedures and institutions that should be structured to render decisions more acceptable and better.
For instance, risk assessment is key in discovering the threshold that empowers regulation to offer public protection against harms in the environment.
However, science still relates human lives to statistical calculation or probabilities. Moreover, substituting or replacing science with democratic decision-making is anti-democratic.
Current legal environmental protection system was enacted based on science. However, it only allows a few agencies and elites, including interest groups in the industry to access environmental protection, moving it away from the public.
Science is increasingly in the eyes of the public, innovation and job creation have high political priority, and controversial science-based budgets continue to decrease. All these are happening at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is focused on carrying out its mission.
EPA’s activities have always been founded on science. And, scientific assessments of factors influencing the environment and human health are still critical.
Moreover, humans continue to exert widespread and profound effects on the environment. At NCSE Conference, we understand the need to increasingly use technical information and recent scientific knowledge to better understand environmental issues that increasingly become more complex.
They’re also key in understanding fast advancing fields of information technology, microbiology, and medicine. With the knowledge and information, regulation and research priorities can be set and future or emerging health and environmental concerns identified.
Ultimately, science supports technical innovations, management and policy to prevent undesirable environmental effects.