Ensuring a risk-informed approach to science and innovation
LIM LI CHING – 15/09/2025
Science and innovation can help address the complex social, economic and environmental challenges of agrifood systems. Nonetheless, science can be a risky business, with new technologies and innovations potentially posing risks and unintended consequences. Such risks need to be robustly identified, assessed and mitigated, so that the contributions of science and innovation can be harnessed safely and with confidence. This will ensure the resilience and sustainability of innovations, encouraging more and better science and innovation for the benefit of all. This is why being ‘risk-informed’ is one of the principles of the FAO Science and Innovation Strategy.
Any application of science and innovation to agrifood systems should not pose risks that could compromise human rights or ecosystem integrity. For example, according to the Right to Food Guidelines, risks have to be addressed in relation to food safety and consumer protection. Moreover, the right to health, as enshrined in human rights instruments, encompasses a range of factors that can help us lead a healthy life. Those related to agrifood systems include safe food, and healthy working and environmental conditions. Ensuring these rights requires assessing and mitigating the risks of new innovations and technologies used in agrifood systems, such as pesticides and living modified organisms (LMOs). Under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, States are already committed to prevent risks to health and safety from technologies, chemicals and agricultural practices, as well as risks of violation of the rights of peasants and other rural workers arising from LMOs.
Risks can also manifest as environmental harm. The UN General Assembly has recognised the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This includes substantive rights to healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, safe water, healthy and sustainable food, and non-toxic environments. The obligation of States to protect the environment is embodied in legally-binding treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Specific to LMOs, Parties are obliged to establish or maintain means to regulate, manage or control risks to biodiversity, taking also into account the risks to human health. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework reiterates these obligations in its biosafety target, while its target on reducing pollution risks envisages a reduction of the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half, by 2030.
Taken together, it is clear that identifying, assessing and mitigating the risks of agricultural technologies and innovations lie at the heart of respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights. In addition, as these rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, a risk-informed approach, and risk assessment itself, must therefore be holistic and transdisciplinary.
Lessons from the use of pesticides and the challenges associated with LMOs illustrate the potential risks of agrifood technologies and innovations. They highlight the urgent need for evidence-based assessments that look at risk comprehensively – from environmental, health, socio-economic, cultural and ethical perspectives. Their implications go beyond biosafety concerns to more fundamental questions – for example, of ensuring that developing countries have access to sustainable and environmentally-sound technologies, while avoiding the ‘dumping’ of obsolete or unsafe technologies and safeguarding food sovereignty. Being risk-informed will allow the exercise of the sovereign rights of States to make development choices aligned and adapted to local needs and contexts, and ensure innovation and technology serve the public good.
With the increasing range and scale of new technologies being applied in agrifood systems, including synthetic biology, new genetic techniques and generative AI, the task of risk identification and mitigation becomes more urgent. These technologies deepen the level of intervention, for example, AI is being used to mine data for novel traits, potentially accelerating the identification of genetic elements such as small regulatory sequences that may mediate the expression of hundreds of genes simultaneously. They also broaden the range of species and ecosystems affected, for example, by increasing applications into wild species, or by promoting genetic changes in nature beyond natural evolutionary processes. At the same time, more crop species are being targeted for engineering or data mining, risking loss of control over indigenous seed or the exploitation of the knowledge and innovations of Indigenous Peoples and small-scale producers, often for the profit of transnational corporations.
As a result, risks and uncertainties are heightened. Importantly, knowledge gaps and scientific ignorance or unknowns, need to be fully acknowledged and identified in order to assess risks in an evidence-based manner. The use of the precautionary approach is therefore warranted, as recognised by the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. It becomes particularly pivotal in instances when risks cannot be mitigated. The precautionary approach is also a key element of a human-rights based approach. For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights determined that, in the context of the rights to life and personal integrity, States must act to protect those rights in cases where there are plausible indications that an activity could result in severe and irreversible damage to the environment, even in the absence of scientific certainty.
As evidenced by ‘late lessons from early warnings’, numerous case studies, including of agrifood innovations, illustrate how the neglect of the precautionary approach could result in more damage and increased costs. Insights which could inform FAO’s approach to science and innovation are that science is relevant for precautionary decision‑making, and that the wider use of a precautionary approach can avert harm and stimulate innovation. These require more and better science, not less, and one that is precipitated by evidence-based, transparent, rigorous and participatory processes. Research and monitoring for early warnings, responding to unknowns as well as uncertainty, addressing ‘blind spots’ and gaps in scientific knowledge, and evaluating alternatives, are some of the late lessonsthat need to be learned.
FAO’s Science and Innovation Strategy should be implemented in a coherent manner, guided by its principles as a whole. These principles are complementary and reinforce each other. Implementing the principle of being risk-informed would help implement the other guiding principles – ensuring that agrifood technologies and innovations are only used when there is sufficient evidence of their safety, and that they improve agrifood systems in a rights-based, needs-driven, ethical and sustainable manner.
In addition, in keeping with the principles of being people-centred and gender-equal, FAO’s work should draw on the full range of scientific and transdisciplinary perspectives for the identification and mitigation of risks. This must centre the knowledge and experiences of Indigenous Peoples and small-scale producers, which are key to a more distributed and equitable approach to science and innovation.
FAO can play a role in strengthening national capacities for risk identification, assessment and mitigation, as well as related policymaking, including in applying the precautionary approach. FAO can also ensure that the latest scientific evidence it analyses and communicates are duly risk-informed. This will help States to deal with the opportunities and challenges posed by new technologies and innovations, and to ensure that their application leads to more resilient and sustainable agrifood systems.
Read the blog here: Ensuring a Risk-Informed Approach to Science and Innovation
Related X post: https://x.com/FAOScienceChief/status/1967592657846521912
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Lim Li Ching is a senior researcher with the Third World Network (TWN), an international policy research and advocacy NGO based in Malaysia, focusing on the rights of peoples in the Global South, a fair distribution of world resources, and ecologically sustainable development that fulfils human needs. She is currently the Co-Chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), and is an advisor to the Agroecology Fund.