Combating Global Pollution

Pollution endangers human and ecosystem health across the globe and society faces many challenges to combat pollution. According to the WHO, poor air quality was estimated to have caused 4.2 million premature deaths in humans in 2016, with 91% of those occurring in low- and middle-income countries. One in four people don’t have access to safe drinking water and thousands of rivers around the world are heavily polluted harming riverine ecosystems and carrying xenobiotics such as pesticides, microplastics, and pharmaceuticals into the global oceans. Soil pollutants such as industrial chemicals, fertilizers, and raw sewage, reduce soil biodiversity and negatively impact food security and human health.
To combat these risks, the European Commission launched a zero pollution action plan in 2021 aiming to reduce air, water and soil pollution to levels no longer considered harmful to health and natural ecosystems. Earth and Environmental Sciences can provide quantitative as well as qualitative information on pollution for a better understanding of the effects on ecosystems, hence improving decision making. This collection brings together research in Earth and Environmental Sciences and innovation that tackles issues of pollution. Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):

• Fate and transport processes of pollutants
• Modelling pollution transport or abundance
• Effects of government policy on pollutants
• Multiple stressors in combination with pollution
• Innovative tools and techniques for monitoring pollution 

Collection advisors: Sonja Oberbeckmann (Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Germany)