Outcome of a public consultation on the draft Guidance document of the EFSA Scientific Committee on Uncertainty in EFSA Scientific Assessment

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) carried out a public consultation to receive input from the scientific community and all interested parties on the draft scientific Guidance document on Uncertainty in EFSA Scientific Assessment. The Guidance is applicable to all areas of EFSA, all types of scientific assessment and all types of uncertainty affecting scientific assessment. It does not prescribe specific methods for uncertainty analysis but rather provides a harmonised and flexible framework within which different methods may be selected, according to the needs of each assessment. Worked examples are provided to illustrate different methods. This draft opinion was prepared by a dedicated working group of the EFSA Scientific Committee and endorsed by the Scientific Committee for public consultation at its plenary meeting of 9 June 2015. The consultation was carried out via the web from 18 June 2015 and the draft opinion was published online with an invitation for submission of written comments by 10 September 2015. EFSA received a total amount of 288 comments from 33 interested parties. The current report presents statistics on the comments received and lists all comments grouped under 41 themes together with detailed answers to them. The submitted comments were considered valuable and were taken into account by the working group when updating the draft scientific guidance document on uncertainty in EFSA scientific assessment. The revised draft scientific guidance was discussed and accepted for the trial phase with EFSA panels at the Scientific Committee plenary meeting of 17 February 2016, and is published in the EFSA website in March 2016. EFSA and its Scientific Committee wish to thank all stakeholders for their contributions.