How Should an Environmental Standard Be Implemented

Mark Crane, Bernard Fisher, Chris Leake, 

Paul Nathanail, Adam Peters Bill Stubblefield, and Tony Warn 

Environmental quality standards (EQSs) are widely used to help protect the environment and human health and are considered by many to consist simply of the stated limit value for a substance plus, perhaps, the time over which the standard applies. An example of this might be an annual average EQS for lead in water of 7.2 pg Ir1 to protect the freshwater environment as proposed in the Water Framework Daughter Directive on EQS (European Commission [EC] 2006). 

This chapter shows that other information must also be considered before an environmental standard can be implemented successfully. The implementation of standards cannot be a totally science-based issue technical, social, and economic factors must also be considered. Critically, as discussed in Chapter 2, the legal or policy context must be clear from the start, and a standard based on scientific knowledge should then be applied to a specific policy context. However, in most situations there are few data and an incomplete understanding, which leads to uncertainty in the standard itself and, potentially, to its application. This uncertainty must be accounted for if a standard is to be applied consistently and fairly (Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution [RCEP] 1998). 

In this chapter, we consider in more depth the following issues  

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