Although preservation of the environment quality is a universally recognized principle, environmental harm is a reality that causes damages of difficult remediation to the environment and human health. The Rio Declaration, which resulted from the Rio-92 Conference, recommends the application of the Precautionary Principle as an anticipatory tool of prevention in environmental impact assessments. Since then, the Precautionary Principle has been used in environmental assessments when current scientific knowledge is faced with the unpredictable. However, such studies often present an incipient approach on the impact on human health for not considering the Precautionary Principle. This work proposes the application of the Precautionary Principle in human health assessment when there is uncertainty on the legitimacy of the activity performed, on the exposure time and dose, and on the single cause or multiple causes of diseases that may occur as a result of an environmental alteration.
Precautionary principle; Environmental harm; Environmental impact assessment; Human health impact assessment