Report of the UNEP/AMAP Expert Group
The release, distribution and degradation of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) into the environment are highly dependent on environmental conditions, among which climate change and increasing climate variability have the potential to affect POPs contamination via changes in emission sources, transport processes and pathways, and routes of degradation.
The first GMP global monitoring report published in 2009 recognized the importance of climate effects on POPs and stressed the need to consider possible climate effects when interpreting temporal trend data for POPs in GMP core media. Complex climate effects on the transport and partitioning of POPs have the potential to significantly complicate the interpretation of measurements of POPs in environmental media in future evaluations of the effectiveness of the Stockholm Convention.
To support informed decision making, the Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention, in collaboration with the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) invited a number of distinguished experts to review the most recent scientific findings on climate change effects on persistent organic pollutants within a global perspective. The report of the UNEP/AMAP expert group, ‘’Climate change and POPs: Predicting the Impacts’’, provides a comprehensive view of the complex inter-linkages between climate and POPs.
Significant climate-induced changes are foreseen in relation to future releases of POPs into the environment, their long-range transport and environmental fate, and human and environmental exposure, subsequently leading to higher health risks for both human populations and the environment. The report also addresses the synergies between the climate change and POPs policy agendas and identifies areas of uncertainty and existing gaps in data, information and knowledge.