In the last 50 years the general public has become engaged in wildlife conservation issues and policy. The IUCN has been at the frontline of expanding public interest and education, often using conservation concepts built around single words (eg ex-tinction, endangered, biodiversity, protection, sustainable, pre-caution). Like flagship species, flagship concepts have captured public interest and to some degree have empowered the public to argue their cases more convincingly. Yet those concepts are often more complex than they appear, especially when it comes to incorporating them in legislation, policy and management protocols.

One of the central conservation concepts today is the Pre-cautionary Principle, and it is fitting that Rosie Cooney has pub-lished a comprehensive report on it. The Precautionary Principle in Biodiversity Conservation and Natural Resource Manage-ment, published by the IUCN Policy and Global Change Group in 2004 (IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK) with assistance from TRAFFIC, ResourceAfrica and Fauna Flora International, is mandatory reading for those who have to deal with precaution in conservation. The 51 page booklet is well referenced, well written and contains insights gained from a consultative process involving a wide range of experts.
Cooney finds consensus about what the Precautionary Prin-ciple is - a view that actions should be taken to avoid serious or irreversible environmental harm, even if the available scientific evidence cannot provide evidence of such harm. But she identi-fies conflict about its value in conservation. Proponents see the Precautionary Principle as a conservative but responsible "safe-guard", whereas opponents see it as "anti-scientific, subject to abuse ... anti-innovation, and anti-sustainable use".

What constitutes serious harm is clearly problematic, be-cause some conservationists see the killing of any individual animal as a serious problem, whereas others are only concerned if uses are unsustainable at the population level. Some conser-vationists see "protection" as the only viable conservation strat-egy because it appears to have minimal risk. Others address the challenge of conservation outside of protected areas, where innovation (new ways of doing things) and risk are essential ingredients. They argue that adaptive management, rather than prescription and precaution, is the only effective strategy for dealing with risk and uncertainty in such situations.

Section 1 (Introduction) deals with the IUCN mandate to ex-amine the Precautionary Principle, generated at the First IUCN World Conservation Congress (Montreal, 1996), and provides the general background and objectives of the initiative under-taken to satisfy that mandate.

Section 2, "The Meaning of the Precautionary Principle", deals with the basic concept of precaution, its formulation into a principle, the difference between a Precautionary Principle and precautionary approach, the factors which distinguish the Pre-cautionary Principle from other well-established principles in environmental law, and the confusion that exists over whether the principle is consistent or at odds with the philosophy of sci-ence.

The degree to which the Precautionary Principle has been incorporated into environmental law is summarized in Section 3, with the major international laws treated separately and case histories used to exemplify the situation at various national lev-els. Fisheries law and policy are treated separately.

The original IUCN mandate called for advice on best practice for the use of the Precautionary Principle in an environmental context, and specifically within IUCN programs. This problem is dealt with in Section 4, which is a masterly and insightful treat-ment of the strengths and weakness of the Precautionary Princi-ple in different practical, conservation contexts.

Cooney concludes (Section 5) that acceptance of the Pre-cautionary Principle is inconsistent across different conservation disciplines and is highly controversial within them. She considers that "bare acceptance" of the principle is unlikely to be helpful in policy or management and argues convincingly that precaution-ary measures need to be tailored to the exact contexts in which they are intended to be beneficial. There is little doubt that this work will become a standard reference on the subject, and all involved in the initiative deserve to be congratulated on the out-come.

This article was first published in the newsletter of the IUCN SSC Sustainable Use Specialist Group: July 2005. More in-formation on the Precautionary Principle Project, as well as the publication itself, are available at: www.pprinciple.net

*Grahame Webb is Chair of the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group, a member of Australia & New Zealand SUSG, Director of Wildlife Management International and Adjunct Professor of the Northern Territories University.