East Asia Monitor
UNU
e-Newsletter
Issue 13. April 2005
In this issue
Editorial Comment:
Dr. Yasuyuki Shibata
of National Institute for Environmental Studies (Environmental Chemistry
Division), Japan, comments on the evolution of the regional POPs monitoring
programme under the Stockholm convention.
The Evolution
of the Regional POPs Monitoring Programme under the Stockholm Convention
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are a group of organochlorine compounds comprising agricultural and industrial chemicals, as well as unintentionally produced chemicals like polychlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans. They have been used or unintentionally produced, and released into the environment for decades. They are persistent, toxic and bioaccumulative in nature, and are transported over long distances to remote areas, distant from human activities.
The possible adverse effects of POPs on human health and the environment have been a major concern, and have led to the establishment of an international treaty to cope with the problem, i.e., Stockholm Convention. The Convention asked Parties to stop the production and usage of POPs, to identify and reduce emission, to identify existing stockpiles and destroy them, and to assess effectiveness of the Convention by reporting environmental monitoring data.
In this context, accurate knowledge on the current situation of POPs opllution is of prime importance and a prerequisite for judging the severity of the problem and developing appropriate methods to solve it. Environmental monitoring, thus, has been conducted in many countries including Japan as the first step in order to provide foundation for further development of countermeasures and regulations to tackle the problem.
The Ministry of the Environment (MoE), Japan, for example, has been conducting national environmental monitoring for more than two decades, and reports the results every year in a book entitled “Chemicals in the Environment”. In this monitoring, a variety of chemicals including POPs has been analyzed in biological samples, such as fishes, bivalves and birds, and the scope was expanded to include other environmental media such as air, water and sediments in later phase. Currently air samples, water samples, sediments and biological samples are collected at around 30 to 70 locations all over Japan, and POPs chemicals within these media (except dioxins and furans, which have been monitored far more intensively) are analyzed by using highly sensitive and selective capillary gaschromatograph high resolution-mass spectrogram method.
Why should we use such an sensitive, accurate but expensive method for the POPs monitoring in Japan? The environmental levels of many of the POPs chemicals in Japan have been decreasing in recent decades and their present levels may not seem to be significant in many places. The Convention, however, asked Parties to undertake further efforts to eliminate POPs in the global environment, and to assess the efficiency of these efforts through using monitoring. Also important is the fact that accurate and precise data by the instrumental analysis will be useful for developing quantitative environmental fate models of the chemicals. Establishment of a reliable fate model will be indispensable for interpreting monitoring data and understanding the environmental dynamics of chemicals more accurately, conducting proper exposure assessment, and developing efficient countermeasures to reduce the risk of chemicals.
In the Stockholm Convention, environmental monitoring for the assessment of effectiveness of the Convention is to be conducted on a regional basis, and establishment of regional framework for the assessment is needed. MoE, Japan, invited governmental officers and scientists from East Asian countries and held workshops on the POPs monitoring twice in order to discuss establishment of such a framework. Now the activity enters into the next trial monitoring phase. Existing monitoring systems will also provide indispensable data for the assessment.
The Coastal Hydrosphere project of the United Nations University supported by Shimadzu Corporation has been conducting capacity building and environmental monitoring for a decade and has established a network of scientists in East Asian countries. It is expected that the UNU project will provide us with fruitful harvest of extensive efforts by participants as well as supporting members, and will become a good model of the regional monitoring system to be established among the Parties of the Stockholm Convention.