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This chapter is mainly about the environmental policies concerning marine issues, particularly pollution, that have adopted by countries around the North East Atlantic, especially around the North Sea; the extent to which these policies depend upon science; the flaws in that science; and what we should do once those flaws are recognised. My excuse for such limited coverage is that the policy developments in this area, with their emphasis on the precautionary principle, are particularly interesting, and there will be many parallels with environmental policies elsewhere in the world.

In the 1960s and 70s environmental policy treated the marine environment as a resource, whose exploitation was limited only by considerations of the effects of one group of people upon another. Thus the effects of pollution on marine species was considered mainly in the context of whether the levels of contamination posed a threat to …