Concerns over environmental impacts resulting from the use of zinc oxide containing medicines for weaning piglets led to the withdrawal of the authorisations for these products in the EU. In order to ...better understand these issues more detailed assessments were conducted for the UK, taking account of the fate of zinc in the environment and its bioavailability to ecological receptors. Four regional scenarios covered the main pig farming areas in the UK and the emission scenario was based on current agricultural practices in the UK. The fate and transport of zinc in the environment was modelled using the Intermediate Dynamic Model for Metals, and the toxicity of zinc in the environment was assessed based on current UK regulatory practices. The model takes account of historic additions of metals to the soils to calculate current and future metal levels in the environment. Whilst three of the four regional scenarios predicted a marginal risk, or no risk, to soils after 50 years of use one of the scenarios indicated a risk to surface waters prior to the use of zinc oxide medicated treatments for weaning piglets, and risks to local soils within 10 years of use. Further site-specific assessments were conducted for this region and one of the other regions, based on site specific emission scenarios, soil and surface waters characteristics. These two site-specific assessments revealed that the modelling results were accurate or conservative depending on the assumptions made about historic inputs of metals to agricultural soils from manure spreading, and that the regional scenario that resulted in significant predicted risks to surface waters did not reflect the actual conditions at the local pig farming sites considered. Comparisons between measured concentrations of copper and zinc at pig farming sites suggest that historic agricultural inputs have been an important source of these metals to agricultural soils at some sites. The limited data available for validation suggest that the IDMM is able to provide accurate predictions of metal levels in both soils and surface waters, but that there is significant uncertainty associated with historic inputs of metals to the soils.
The risks to the environment from the use of zinc based veterinary medicines were evaluated for the UK using the Intermediate Dynamic Model for Metals to predict fate and taking account of bioavailability in evaluating risks to ecological receptors.
As the pressure to take action against global warming is growing in urgency, scenarios that incorporate multiple social, economic and environmental drivers become increasingly critical to support ...governments and other stakeholders in planning climate change mitigation or adaptation actions. This has led to the recent explosion of future scenario analyses at multiple scales, further accelerated since the development of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) research community Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). While RCPs have been widely applied to climate models to produce climate scenarios at multiple scales for investigating climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities (CCIAV), SSPs are only recently being scaled for different geographical and sectoral applications. This is seen in the UK where significant investment has produced the RCP-based UK Climate Projections (UKCP18), but no equivalent UK version of the SSPs exists. We address this need by developing a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative UK-SSPs, following a state-of-the-art scenario methodology that integrates national stakeholder knowledge on locally-relevant drivers and indicators with higher level information from European and global SSPs. This was achieved through an intensive participatory process that facilitated the combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches to develop a set of UK-specific SSPs that are locally comprehensive, yet consistent with the global and European SSPs. The resulting scenarios balance the importance of consistency and legitimacy, demonstrating that divergence is not necessarily the result of inconsistency, nor comes as a choice to contextualise narratives at the appropriate scale.
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•Climate change impact and risk assessments need downscaled climate projections and context-relevant socioeconomic scenarios•We co-created UK versions of the SSPs for use by the UK climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability community•Global and European SSPs were integrated with national knowledge to develop scenarios relevant to the UK context•The UK-SSPs balance the importance between consistency and legitimacy•Stakeholder-led national SSPs can be consistent with higher-level SSPs with a well-designed co-production process
Nanotechnology is identified as a key enabling technology due to its potential to contribute to economic growth and societal well-being across industrial sectors. Sustainable nanotechnology requires ...a scientifically based and proportionate risk governance structure to support innovation, including a robust framework for environmental risk assessment (ERA) that ideally builds on methods established for conventional chemicals to ensure alignment and avoid duplication. Exposure assessment developed as a tiered approach is equally beneficial to nano-specific ERA as for other classes of chemicals. Here we present the developing knowledge, practical considerations and key principles need to support exposure assessment for engineered nanomaterials for regulatory and research applications.
Land degradation directly affects around 25% of land globally, undermining progress on most of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly target 15.3. To assess land degradation, SDG ...indicator 15.3.1 combines sub-indicators of productivity, soil carbon and land cover. Over 100 countries have set Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets. Here, we demonstrate application of the indicator for a well-established agricultural landscape using the case study of Great Britain. We explore detection of degradation in such landscapes by: 1) transparently evaluating land cover transitions; 2) comparing assessments using global and national data; 3) identifying misleading trends; and 4) including extra sub-indicators for additional forms of degradation. Our results demonstrate significant impacts on the indicator both from the land cover transition evaluation and choice or availability of data. Critically, we identify a misleading improvement trend due to a trade-off between improvement detected by the productivity sub-indicator, and 30-year soil carbon loss trends in croplands (11% from 1978 to 2007). This carbon loss trend would not be identified without additional data from Countryside Survey (CS). Thus, without incorporating field survey data we risk overlooking the degradation of regulating and supporting ecosystem services (linked to soil carbon), in favour of signals from improving provisioning services (productivity sub-indicator). Relative importance of these services will vary between socioeconomic contexts. Including extra sub-indicators for erosion or critical load exceedance, as additional forms of degradation, produced a switch from net area improving (9%) to net area degraded (58%). CS data also identified additional degradation for soil health, including 44% arable soils exceeding bulk density thresholds and 35% of CS squares exceeding contamination thresholds for metals.
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•Land Degradation Neutrality indicator may omit important forms of degradation.•Assessments should explicitly consider trade-offs.•Inventories may bias towards productivity due to relative ease of detecting trends.•Tier 3 data critical to assess degradation of regulating and supporting services.•Inventories can go from net improving to net degraded with inclusion of extra data.
Challenges in distinguishing between natural and engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) and the lack of historical records on ENM accidents have hampered attempts to estimate the accidental release and ...associated environmental impacts of ENMs. Building on knowledge from the nuclear power industry, we provide an assessment of the likelihood of accidental release rates of ENMs within the next 10 and 30 years. We evaluate risk predictive methodology and compare the results with empirical evidence, which enables us to propose modelling approaches to estimate accidental release risk probabilities. Results from two independent modelling approaches based on either assigning 0.5% of reported accidents to ENM-releasing accidents (M1) or based on an evaluation of expert opinions (M2) correlate well and predict severe accidental release of 7% (M1) in the next 10 years and of 10% and 20% for M2 and M1, respectively, in the next 30 years. We discuss the relevance of these results in a regulatory context.
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