The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has been awarded GBP6m (US$7.6m) to undertake research into the effects potentially hazardous chemicals used by humans are having on habitats and wildlife.
The project is the result of a recent workshop co-hosted by NERC, including representatives from government, regulation and industry. It concluded that vital research needs to be done to understand the impact new chemicals and combinations of chemicals are having on the country’s ecosystems. This could potentially include chemicals used in the textile industry.
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NERC is the UK’s main agency for funding and managing research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences.
With new chemicals constantly being used in agriculture, industry and everyday life, the research not only hopes to uncover unforeseen effects, but also to devise a new way for testing the impacts that can be applied to all types of ecosystems found in freshwater, at sea and on land.
The current standard method of testing determines how toxic individual chemicals are but is unable to look at the combined effects of a mixture of chemicals, which researchers say can be quite a different picture.
The team, led by Professor Guy Woodward, is looking to pioneer a framework for assessing and predicting the impact of new chemicals on the environment. Their project will combine modelling, experimental manipulations and monitoring across a range of freshwater ecosystems. A major component of their work will also involve figuring out how emerging chemical threats will interact with the effects of climate change, like warming and drought.
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By GlobalData“Currently, we cannot accurately predict the impacts of new chemicals on natural systems, from genes to entire ecosystems, so our aim is to develop novel techniques to bridge this gap,” says Professor Guy Woodward, an ecologist at Imperial College London. “In addition to our own project, we are also very excited to work with the other successful bids in the call to create new complementary approaches and, hopefully, to deliver further benefits across the programme as a whole.”
