Evaluation of Siting Strategies: The Case of Two UK Waste Tire Incinerators

Examines the circumstances that may have contributed to differing outcomes with respect to siting similar facilities in the UK

Risk Communication and Management in the 21st Century

Environmental, food, and health regulation in the UK and in many other European countries is in a state of crisis. Following a series of regulatory scandals, regulators decided that drastic changes were needed. There would be no more consensual style regulation with closed-door deliberations between industry and regulators. The public's trust toward regulators had disappeared, and the continued deteriorating situation was not made better by an increasingly aggressive media trying to either directly or indirectly discredit the regulators by unnecessarily amplifying risks and, in many cases, manufacturing uncertainty. Regulators and their advisors took the view that the best way out of this quagmire would be to put forward a new model of regulatory decision-making. This model would be based on transparency throughout the regulatory process and would encourage public and stakeholder deliberation. The model would also promote risk-averse decision making such as the adoption of the precautionary principle, as regulators are frightened about possible scandals lurking around the corner. Finally, in the new model, scientists are to a certain degree demoted. The new model of regulatory decision-making is not problem-free, however. It has a number of teething problems, which this paper addresses.

The Plateau-ing of the European Better Regulation Agenda: An Analysis of Activities Carried Out by the Barroso Commission

This paper examines the European Commission's (EC) Better Regulation Agenda, from the time that President Barroso came to power, in November 2004 , to the 2006 summer recess. It particularly focuses on whether the Commission's regulatory thinking has moved away from the precautionary principle and towards Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), something I predicted in 2004 (Lofstedt 2004). The article summarizes the papers and communications in the Better Regulation area put forward by the Commission since November 2004, and makes a number of observations about how the Better Regulation Agenda may develop in the future. In conclusion I argue that the Commission's Better Regulation Agenda has plateaued. Commissioner Verheugen will not be successful in pushing the Agenda further forward because of issues such as REACH and opposition from member states, notably France. It is based on a combination of desk research and interviews with policy-makers, regulators, academics and stakeholders who have been involved either in shaping or fighting the Better Regulation Agenda.Regulatory Reform

The Swing of the Regulatory Pendulum in Europe: From Precautionary Principle to (Regulatory) Impact Analysis

Regulation in Europe is currently driven by three distinct, yet not entirely unrelated factors. These are competitiveness, sustainable development and governance. Increasingly these factors influence both the need for, and concepts of, what the European Commission (the Commission) refers to as "better regulation".To ensure better regulation, two regulatory philosophies have been put forward, namely the precautionary principle and impact assessment.In this paper, I first briefly describe the current drivers of better regulation. Then I examine the use of these two regulatory philosophies in helping to achieve better regulation. In the final section I offer some speculations on the future development of European Union (EU) regulation. Will elements of the Commission and the EU member states operate in an even more precautionary environment, or will the implementation of the precautionary principle be seen as too costly, forcing regulators to resort to an even greater use of impact analysis'

The changing nature of communication and regulation of risk in Europe

The regulation and communication of risk has changed significantly over the past 20 years or so, partially as a result of a number of regulatory scandals in Europe and elsewhere (Lofstedt 2004: Majone and Everson 2001; Sunstein 2005), which have led to public distrust of regulators and policy makers. This increase in public distrust has resulted in a phasing-out of consensual-style regulation, and the emergence of a newer model of regulation based on variables including public participation, transparency, and increasingly powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This paper discusses some of the consequences of adopting this new model of regulation through a series of case studies

Risk Communication and Management in the Twenty-First Century

Risk management and risk communication in Europe have undergone profound changes over the past twenty years or so. This paper briefly outlines the changes that have occurred over time and discusses some of the resulting teething problems that have taken place and which now need to be addressed

European Food Safety Authority - risk communication annual review

This research report was commissioned by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to provide an independent review of the Authority's risk communication activities in relation to the safety of food in four cases: GMOs; BSE in goats; mercury in wild and farmed fish; and semicarbazide in baby food. The review first outlines the historical context to communicating food risks in Europe before setting out three fundamental principles for effectively communicating risk. These principles concern: creating appropriate risk communication channels; the credibility of communications; and the efficient delivery of decision relevant information. These principles are used to develop normative criteria against which to evaluate EFSA's risk communications for each of the four cases. The review concludes by providing a number of key recommendations to help EFSA further improve and professionalize the Authority's risk communication activities

Continuation of Nesterov's Smoothing for Regression with Structured Sparsity in High-Dimensional Neuroimaging

Predictive models can be used on high-dimensional brain images for diagnosis of a clinical condition. Spatial regularization through structured sparsity offers new perspectives in this context and reduces the risk of overfitting the model while providing interpretable neuroimaging signatures by forcing the solution to adhere to domain-specific constraints. Total Variation (TV) enforces spatial smoothness of the solution while segmenting predictive regions from the background. We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex loss, a non-smooth convex penalty (whose proximal operator is known) and a wide range of possible complex, non-smooth convex structured penalties such as TV or overlapping group Lasso. Existing solvers are either limited in the functions they can minimize or in their practical capacity to scale to high-dimensional imaging data. Nesterov's smoothing technique can be used to minimize a large number of non-smooth convex structured penalties but reasonable precision requires a small smoothing parameter, which slows down the convergence speed. To benefit from the versatility of Nesterov's smoothing technique, we propose a first order continuation algorithm, CONESTA, which automatically generates a sequence of decreasing smoothing parameters. The generated sequence maintains the optimal convergence speed towards any globally desired precision. Our main contributions are: To propose an expression of the duality gap to probe the current distance to the global optimum in order to adapt the smoothing parameter and the convergence speed. We provide a convergence rate, which is an improvement over classical proximal gradient smoothing methods. We demonstrate on both simulated and high-dimensional structural neuroimaging data that CONESTA significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art solvers in regard to convergence speed and precision.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted in IEEE TMI, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 201

Less than half of the European dietary recommendations for fish consumption are satisfied by national seafood supplies

Funding This research was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) under the East of Scotland Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership (EastBio DTP) [grant number BB/M010996/1]. The research of BdR is supported by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS). Acknowledgements We thank Dr Niall. G Fallon (University of Aberdeen) for his analytical assistance.Peer reviewedPublisher PD