Science demands a rigorous approach to evidence use and transparent communication of the process and results. Uncertainty about evidence is an integral part of any scientific assessment and contributes making the scientific advice more transparent and robust. This symposium will provide an overview of some of the current approaches to assess and communicate scientific uncertainty developed and applied by European institutions and academic researchers.
EU Agencies within the EU Agency Network for Scientific Advice (EU ANSA) provide scientific advice to EU policy makers across a broad spectrum of disciplines from public health to gender equality. This session will explore the different approaches to address scientific uncertainty by EU ANSA member Agencies to better understand how uncertainty is conceptualised and addressed, and to identify common themes and issues.
After a 12-month trial phase the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will begin rolling out by mid 2018 a harmonised approach for assessing and taking account of uncertainties across food safety, animal and plant health areas. This session will present some applications in risk assessment from the trial phase and also shed light on the challenges. Piloting the guidance highlighted the potential common ground where EFSA will benefit from applying and adapting the approach across the wide variety of types of assessment EFSA carries out.
Official recommendations by public health authorities on how to communicate scientific uncertainties are scarce and tend to be limited in their breadth and scope. This session will present a tailored approach newly developed by EFSA that goes further, offering a more comprehensive and targeted level of advice and practical tools for communicators in the food safety area.
Uncertainty is an integral part of science, statistics, and measurement. Yet when experts communicate their findings, there seems to be anxiety that highlighting uncertainty will only serve to decrease trust and diminish comprehension. This session will provide results on a set of experimental studies, where the effects of communicating epistemic uncertainty about numbers, both in numeric and verbal formats were investigated. The generalizability of the results will be discussed as well as directions for future research.