Chemical Pollution

While concentrations of so-called Priority Pollutants and classical Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are declining there are strong indications that the complex mixture of the numerous emerging pollutants including pesticides, biocides, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, additives to food and plastics and many more pose a risk to aquatic ecosystems and human health.

SOLUTIONS addresses major gaps in
assessing emerging pollutants including:

detection at very low concentration
toxicant identification
fate prediction
European scale exposure prediction
scenarios for pollution of the future
abatement options

Water quality

Despite significant management efforts addressing habitat quality the good ecological status of European surface waters as required by the Water Framework Directive is not achieved in most European water bodies. Sensitive species are declining and import ecosystems goods and services are endangered.

SOLUTIONS provides innovative approaches for
assessing effects of emerging pollutants on the
status of water resources including:

effect-based monitoring
ecological assessment
toxicity prediction
mixture effect prediction
ecological and human risk modelling

The approach

The project wants to provide solutions for emerging pollutants in european water resources in close dialogue with stakeholders.

To that end the project develops the conceptual framework as well as monitoring and modelling tools for the identification, assessment and prioritisation of hazardous pollutants and mixtures in European water resources and suggest river basin specific pollutants.

Concepts and tools will be demonstrated in large trans-european case studies. The knowledge base and decision support for the abatement of risks will be provided.

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What happened so far?

SOLUTIONS performed its first large scale sampling campaign together with the Joint Danube Survey 3 taking water, sediment, invertebrate and fish samples at 68 sites along a river stretch of 2375 km from Regensburg in Germany to the Danube Delta in Romania und Ukraine.

Presently, all these samples are analysed for more than 400 target chemicals, for unknown contaminants as well as for potential adverse effects to aquatic organisms and humans.

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Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
Permoserstrasse 15
D-04318 Leipzig
Germany

E-mail: david.lopez-herraez@ufz.de
Tel.: 0049/341/235-1581
www.ufz.de

Chemical Pollution

Water quality

The approach

What happened so far?

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