😀

Assessing the combined toxicity, cumulative hazard, and cumulative risk of PPCP in wastewaters in the future

As the world’s population grows and ages, pharmaceutical consumption is forecast to grow, driving a likely increase in environmental risk due to the high potential of therapeutic agents to act on non-target wildlife as well as their human targets. Research into pharmaceuticals as pollutants has lagged behind work on more prominent contaminants such as pesticides and heavy metals, due in part to the difficulty of monitoring and predicting the concentrations of such a wide range of substances.

In Norway, where my PhD is based, the Norwegian Institute for Public Health records every sale of pharmaceuticals in the country. I plan to use this data to predict environmental concentrations in previous years, allowing for not only prediction of current risks using publicly available but also extrapolation of risk in the future. By developing a Bayesian network in conjunction with ESR 12’s work, I further hope to create a probabilistic prediction of risk under future climate change and population demographic scenarios, with the ultimate goal of developing a prioritisation list of high-right and soon to be high-risk pharmaceuticals on which risk mitigation efforts should be focused.

Forecasting future changes in chemical risks in urban and agricultural systems and assessing mitigation possibilities

Chemicals form a core part of our everyday lives as they provide vital services for our health, food security and industrial production. However, their use can also result in emissions to the environment. Over the last decades, the worldwide consumption of chemicals has increased both in volume and in diversity and these trends are expected to continue. As society develops, new chemicals will continue to be introduced into the environment. Together with increased water use and increased production and use of chemicals the chemical burden on the aquatic environment rise, highlighting the need for effective mitigation options to reduce chemical emissions to these environments.
We are interested in assessing multiple options across a chemicals life-cycle (i.e. from their design and regulation to their use and waste stage) that can prevent or reduce the emission of chemicals to the environment and close the gap towards a toxic-free environment.