On February 21-22, 2019, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the German Federal Office for Risk Assessment (BfR) hosted the “International Conference on Uncertainty in Risk Analysis” (FPF reported). On August 13, 2019, EFSA published a report about the event providing an overview of the conference’s primary aims and conclusions that were drawn. The event’s discussions were reported to emphasize the “importance of uncertainty analysis for scientific assessments, the associated implications for decision making, and the need to communicate the most relevant uncertainties to decision makers and to the broad public.” Three main conclusions from the event included i) “training can be helpful in improving understanding of uncertainty,” ii) “scientists have an ethical responsibility to communicate uncertainty,” and iii) “the risk assessor needs to take active steps to avoid undetected sources of uncertainty,” which includes accounting for uncertainty caused by choice of model structure, use of standard measures, an the “unambiguous definition of the problem itself.”
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EFSA (August 13, 2019). “International Conference on Uncertainty in Risk Analysis.”
