A/42/427
English
Page 228
locate away from population centres, and that would discourage people from moving close to plants and waste disposal sites;
- ensure that plant workers are provided with full information about the products and technologies they handle, and are given adequate training in safe operational procedures and emergency preparedness; and
- involve local governments and community residents in me)or siting decisions and emergency preparedness planning.
In industry, we feel it must now be made mandatory for any firm that is potentially polluting nature through liquid gas or particle emissions to enrol their staff in short but instructive courses of environmental education. Too often firms pollute not Just through accident or design but through gross ignorance by the labour involved of the destructive effect on the environment.
Donald Aubrey
Society to Overcome Pollution
WCED Public Hearing
Ottawa, 26-27 May 1986
86. Increasingly, the consequences of accidents may seriously affect neighbouring countries. Nations should enter into arrangements with other nations that could be seriously affected by an accident in hazardous facilities located on its territory, under which they would agree to:
- notify each other of the location and essential characteristics of existing hazardous installations, an accident in which could spill over and affect lives, property, and ecosystems in the other
- prepare contingency plans covering potential accidents in these installations;
- provide prompt alert. full information and mutual assistance in case of accidents;
- establish criteria for selection of sites for new hazardous facilities, which would then be subject to the above: and
- establish standards for the liability and compensation for any damage caused by transfrontier pollution.
87. Industrial accidents and their consequences are to a large extent unpredictable. In order to better identify risks, governments, international organizations, and industry itself should promote further development of technology/risk assessment methodologies, establish data banks on such assessments conducted, and make them easily available to all countries.
