Science & Technology CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Sense About Science (Risk 17)

1. Introduction

1.1 Sense About Science is a UK-registered charity (No 1101114) to equip people to make sense of science and evidence. We work with thousands of scientists and hundreds of groups across civil society to respond to questions and challenge misleading claims about evidence.

1.2 We are unable to address all of the questions posed by the committee. We particularly address questions 3, 4 and 6 put forward by the committee in their call for submissions.

2. Question 3. How effectively does local and central Government communicate risk and could it be improved?

2.1 The House of Commons Science and Technology committee report on “Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making”1 specifically provided recommendations on Risk Communication, the Precautionary Principle and a Common Language of Risk that could be useful across Government. We have found these recommendations to be of enduring relevance.

2.2 The recommendations included a pro-active approach to working with the media in this area and said that government guidance should encourage a more aggressive approach to correcting inaccuracies or misinterpretations in media coverage of risk. The way that risk is communicated can be compromised by government reactions to reports of events, both by adopting or changing policies as a knee-jerk response and in the way that the communication of risk is done.

2.3 We also need to consider what is happening at the European level, since EU decisions regarding risk management and the way that risks are communicated affect national perceptions. For example, the EU Physical Agents (EMF) Directive 2004/40/EC, which seeks to define safe levels for equipment operators’ exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF), puts limits on exposure for operating staff. In the Directive, European legislators adopted overly-cautious restrictions which would have had consequences for clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These might have been unintended, but threatened potentially disastrous limitations on the use of the technology despite there being no known harmful effects on staff exposed to low frequency EMF, such as is used in MRI systems. It was argued that adoption of precautionary, even unfounded, regulatory limits provides reassurance. In our experience, with radiation in particular, it is as likely to cause politicians, the media, campaign groups and thereby the public to conclude that this is evidence of danger. We can provide further information about the unintended consequences of precautionary measures on risk perception; some academic work in the UK, Germany and elsewhere has begun to look at this problem over the past four years.

3. Question 4. To what extent can public perceptions be changed by improving risk communication? (please provide examples)

3.1 At Sense About Science we monitor public debates, enquiries, science stories in the news, new science legislation and consultations. If we see an issue regularly occurring and find ourselves constantly fire-fighting, or if there are underlying assumptions that would be useful to the discussion, we address these through collaborative projects which respond to specific misconceptions. If there are areas in which public perception seems to be based on misinformation or misconceptions, we find it is helpful to start by addressing these directly instead of just setting out everything that we might know about the area.

3.2 In doing this and to be able to communicate about risk effectively we need to address uncertainty. Over the last two years, Sense About Science has seen an increase in questions from members of the public about the meaning of uncertainty and worries among scientists about its misinterpretation.

3.3 We have established a working group and will produce a guide early in 2012 to include the following points: Uncertainty is typically taken to mean “we don’t know”, when rather it is a statement of how confident we are. Uncertainty doesn’t mean that anything goes, or that it is impossible to be certain of anything surrounding the issue under discussion. Rather, uncertainty shows that an investigation of the subject has been taken seriously.

3.4 Scientists should be able to talk about uncertainty without it being interpreted that every topic in a whole discipline is open to interpretation or that there is no consensus view.

4. Question 6. How do risk perceptions and communication issues in the UK compare to those of other countries?

4.1 This memo is concerned with the media reporting of the Tohoku Great Earthquake in Japan in March 2011 and reporting of the subsequent events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.2 The earthquake and ensuing tsunami led to nearly 16,000 dead and over 3,000 people missing now presumed dead. Towns were sluiced away and there was extensive damage to food and water supplies, medical services, power and communications, affecting hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

4.2 Following the Tohoku earthquake politicians focused on the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the prospect of losing control over the nuclear reactors there. On Tuesday 15 March, the EU Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger said: “There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen. Practically everything is out of control. I cannot exclude the worst in the hours and days to come.”

4.3 Whilst there clearly was a serious issue that needed addressing in Japan, it is doubtful that public clarity would be achieved by referring to the situation at the Fukushima plant as the “apocalypse”. It seems unlikely to help people understand the situation in order to tackle and weigh-up the specific problems in a considered and measured way, which must be a priority when policy-makers and Governments communicate risk, rather than political point-scoring.

4.4 It is likely that the way the events at Fukushima were communicated in different countries and the reaction of policy makers in different countries also affected risk perceptions.

4.5 According to the findings of the Global @dvisor Wave 20 (G@20), an Ipsos survey on Global Citizen Reaction to the Fukushima Nuclear Plant Disaster shows that three in five global citizens (62%) oppose the use of nuclear energy and that a quarter (26%) of those have been influenced by the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

4.6 However the UK does not appear to reflect this. In his recent column “Learning the lessons of Fukushima”,3 Professor Nick Pidgeon refers to these results as well as tracking data from the Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Energy in Britain by Cardiff University. He argues that these results seem to indicate that “Fukushima has had little impact on overall UK public concern about nuclear power”, in contrast to the picture globally.

4.7 In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on 15 March an immediate three-month closure of seven of the older nuclear power reactors in the country. This was just a few days after the tsunami affected the Fukushima Daiichi plant and appears to have been a knee-jerk reaction to the media coverage rather than any reassessment of the risk that these plants posed. In May, Merkel went on to announce that all nuclear power plants would close down by the end of 2022 based on the reporting of an “ethics committee” and following many public demonstrations against nuclear power. Germany also plans to significantly decrease carbon dioxide emissions but it has been estimated that these will increase—with an extra 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide until 2020.4

5. Declaration of Interests

5.1 We have no competing interests to declare.

12 December 2011