Hello I’m Veerle Heyvaert and
I'm a professor at the LSE School of Law.
My recent research is on risk regulation
and it asks, how should society respond
to be effective in the face of major social risks,
which include risks such as climate change,
and also the control of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.
Zoonotic diseases, those are diseases
that start in animal populations
and that then transmit and mutate
and become infectious in human populations.
Now, that's obviously a huge question,
and risk regulation is a really rich
field and covers lots of different issues
such as well,
which risks should governments look at
and which ones should they leave alone?
Now, here,
when you're dealing with major social risks
such as climate change
and zoonotic diseases, there's a broad consensus
that this is an area
where governments should intervene.
But even if that settled,
there are a lot of other issues, such as, well,
how should regulators set standards for behaviour
in those areas?
How should they communicate
those standards to the target audience?
And how should they enforce the standards?
And then there are questions
that have to do
with the timing of regulatory interventions.
At what stage in the development of a risk
should a regulator intervene
to be most effective?
And that's the kind of question
that my recent research has been looking at.
There are a lot of different choices there.
Say, for example, that you want to go
and attend a public lecture at LSE, but
it's raining
and you're worried you might catch a cold.
There are different things you could do.
You could say, "Oh, well,
I'm not going to take the chance.
I'll just stay home
and maybe I'll just catch the podcast later."
Or you could say, “Well, OK, I'm going to go,
but I'll make sure that I take an umbrella
and that I take my raincoat.
And that way I reduce the likelihood
of catching a cold.”
Or you could say, "Well, you know, I'll just go,
and if I catch a cold, well then,
I'll just stock up on some cold medicine
later and, make sure that I have
a couple of box sets lined up to get me through."
So those are all different types of choices.
Now, obviously,
when you're dealing with major social risks
such as climate change
and zoonotic disease control,
it's not as if the governments
are just taking one particular measure,
they're taking a combination of measures.
But still, there are certain profiles that we see
emerging there. For example, for climate change,
we see a lot of measures that are of the
"I'll go to the lecture,
but I will wear protective equipment", variety.
So those refer to measures, for example,
on emission reduction interventions,
carbon taxes that are being introduced,
maximum emission levels that are being set,
energy efficiency standards that are being imposed.
Those are all the middle style of intervention measures.
When we look at zoonotic disease control,
what we see is that there's a lot of reliance on
end of the stage intervention measures,
the equivalent to
"I'll take my chances and I'll stock up on cold medicine".
For example, there's a lot of reliance
on culling, on actually taking out disease
populations after a disease has already entered
into society and spread
among animal populations.
Now, OK, that's fine,
we see we have this particular profile,
not so much early stage intervention,
a lot more middle stage intervention,
and especially for zoonotic diseases,
heavily reliance on end of the cycle intervention.
Now, the question is,
is that the right kind of mix?
Is that the most effective solution?
And here,
my research argues that actually it isn't.
That because of the particular risk profiles
of climate change and also zoonotic disease risks,
we should actually be investing a lot more
in early stage intervention
than we currently are.
Basically there are two reasons for that.
So we need to do a lot more of the
"Let's stay at home,
let's not take the risk to begin with"
kind of intervention.
And there are a few reasons for this.
Key reasons are, first of all, if we look at
what kind of risks these are, climate change risk
and zoonotic disease risks,
they are special risks.
They're what
I label inter-systemic, systemic risks.
Now, what that means is that
if these risks materialise,
they don't only create
particular negative consequences,
but they actually trigger additional risks
that cascade through social systems
and that not only cascade within one system,
but that spillover into other social systems.
To give an example, COVID-19,
which is of course
a zoonotic disease that has materialised,
the risks related to COVID-19
aren't just that an individual
catches COVID-19 and gets sick,
but also that the health system itself
comes under pressure.
And if the health system
as a whole comes under pressure,
that means that people who don't have COVID-19 but
who struggle with other illnesses
are also at risk.
And if you have an
entire society with an impaired health,
that also creates a number of financial
and economic risks,
so they spillover into other systems.
Now, what my research argues
is that if you have that kind of profile,
then the advantages of cutting off the risks
at the pass of intervening early, far outstrip
the advantages of waiting and of trying to deal
with all these different spillovers
further down the line.
And then there's also
a second point,
and that has to do with uncertainty.
Now, typically, traditionally
the presence
of uncertainty surrounding a particular problem
is used as an argument to postpone intervention.
The idea being that, well, if we're not sure
what the relationship is between a risk
and particular impacts,
then we might be making a mistake,
we might be making
the wrong kind of intervention.
So we should hold off.
That is the case,
but here my work argues that
you have to look at the kind of uncertainty
that is prominent
in the context of climate change
and in the context of zoonotic diseases.
If you think about that here we really don't have
that much of cause effect uncertainty anymore.
The relationship
between rising manmade greenhouse gas emissions
and rising temperatures, and the health
and environmental impacts from that,
that relationship is soundly established.
And similarly,
for zoonotic diseases,
we know what the main drivers are
of zoonotic diseases.
They are habitat encroachments for wildlife
and intensive farming practices
and for animal farming and cattle rearing.
So that is not the kind of uncertainty
we are contending with mostly.
Overwhelmingly nowadays,
our uncertainty on the issues of climate change
and zoonotic disease have to do with distribution.
Which dam is going to burst, at what point,
which particular impact is going to occur,
at what moment,
which particular disease is going to mutate
and is going to transfer
over to human population.
But that kind of uncertainty,
distribution uncertainty,
that uncertainty is not one that is best
fought with end of the line
late intervention measures.
It's best fought
with early intervention measures.
So those are two key reasons why
my work argues that we should be investing more
in early stage interventions in both of
these fields.
Now, practically, what
does this translate in
well, for zoonotic diseases, for example,
it would mean that we would invest a lot
in having
much more extensive habitats protection
and also really in
thoroughly changing the production processes
in the global supply chain for animal products.
When it comes to climate change,
it means investing a lot more
in having tougher restrictions
on the issues of development
consent at the planning stage and also
in downscaling and phasing out
the very production
of fossil fuels to begin with.
Now, politically,
these are hard messages to sell,
but what I hope my research
and more of our research here at LSE shows
is that at least from a risk regulation perspective,
they're the sensible choice to make.