Holmes, C.M.¹; Maltby, L.²; Marshall, S.³; Otte, J.C.⁴; Sweeny, P.⁵; Thorbek, P.⁴
- Applied Analysis Solutions LLC, USA
- Sheffield University, UK
- Consultant, UK
- BASF SE, Germany
- Syngenta, UK
The prospective risk assessment of chemicals across all regulatory jurisdictions follows a generic approach, comparing estimated exposures to toxic thresholds designed to be protective of all species. This approach does not recognize geographic patterns of species distributions or acknowledge that particularly sensitive species may not occupy potentially exposed habitats. Therefore, risk assessments could be overly conservative and restrictive for some uses of chemicals.
Geo-referenced ecological data are becoming increasingly available at spatial resolutions applicable to chemical risk assessment, potentially facilitating enhanced environmental relevance of such risk assessments. Greater realism in assessing additional stress due to chemical exposure could be achieved if the range of managed and unmanaged environmental typologies and their constituent biological communities were mapped and described.
In 2017 ECETOC initiated a Task Force to investigate current capabilities in making spatially explicit chemical risk assessment (from both an exposure and effects perspective). After comprehensive research for applicable and available data, we investigated techniques and methods for combining disparate data sets using case studies, and identified some of the challenges of using different levels of taxonomic, spatial and temporal resolution in spatially explicit risk assessments.
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