People want to know what institutions do and I think they are right.
They should know.
And we take very important decisions in EFSA.
We decide about risks that are allowed or not allowed in our food
so it’s touching us very personally.
It’s a very important task and this has to be as open and as transparent as possible.
By being more transparent it will help people to realise that EFSA
is there to act in their interest
and if they feel that EFSA isn’t doing what it should be doing then
they’ll have a chance to feed in too.
So, when we want to make EFSA a more open scientific organisation
we have to cover all streams, how we call it, that enter
into the risk assessment process. Data, information, evidence, methodologies,
how we assess this data and brains, expertise.
EFSA has collected over the years a huge amount of data,
food consumption data, chemical occurrence data, microbiological data.
We use this data for our risk assessments.
But now we want to make this data more accessible
and this we call the EFSA scientific data warehouse project,
to open as much as possible our treasure trove of data
to be used and reused for other purposes by other people in Europe.
We provide enough information for other people outside to see exactly
what we’ve done and if need be almost to do the same again by looking
at the data that we’re looking at
and maybe to come towards the same conclusion.
Science is always organised around methods, methodologies,
and we need risk assessment methodologies to tackle very complex
problems that society asks EFSA.
Methods for Evidence Use in Science is a framework that EFSA has developed
recently to enhance the way in which data is gathered, used, reported
and therefore works its way into the risk assessment.
Uncertainty is an inevitable part of risk assessment.
To be able to capture it, to describe it and to report it
is very important also for the risk managers.
We are developing guidance how the experts on the individual sector panels
can do things such as addressing the uncertainty within the risk assessments,
how they actually weigh all the different pieces of evidence together to come up
with a unified conclusion.
The more that we can enable stakeholders to see how we’re working,
but also to be able to feed in, whether that’s through open consultations,
open meetings or actually looking at the data that underpins those assessments
and be able to comment and scrutinise it, then there will be greater trust,
but also higher quality outputs.
Expertise you could also say is the lifeblood of risk assessment.
Nothing can be done without the right experts.
So we do huge efforts to attract the best scientists of Europe.
We want to have the best people.
EFSA uses a large number of scientific experts.
It selects those on the basis of their individual scientific expertise and experience.
We want the next generation of risk assessors to come in and work with us.
Open EFSA is a huge challenge for us but a positive challenge.
We want to engage with the people.
Not only to show what we do but to ask people to contribute to our work;
to contribute with their knowledge, with their data,
to make the outputs of EFSA even better.