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PolicyNet
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PolicyNet Meeting
Professor Michael Depledge, Head of Science at the Environment Agency spoke at the first PolicyNet event for 2005 about the Agency’s work in detecting and monitoring threats to ecosystems and human health. Although around half of the Agency’s £1bn/pa funding is spent on managing flood-related risks, about £80m per year is also spent on compliance monitoring of waterways and natural environments across England and Wales. Such monitoring currently relies on Agency workers taking field samples for laboratory analysis which has proved to be a time and labour intensive process, particularly as there over 100,000 known chemicals that could potentially be released into the environment.
Professor Depledge highlighted how advances in sensor technology are allowing for environments to be monitored remotely without the need for point sampling by field workers. The benefit of this approach is that rather than sampling everything the Agency can monitor the entire ecosystem and get an overall sense of environmental health in a much more cost-effective way. By building up information on the characteristics of each environment sensor systems can provide an early warning of any anomalies enabling the Agency to target its investigations more effectively.
Technology is also allowing the Agency to build complex models of natural environments which will help to improve their management in the future. Professor Depledge illustrated how Lidar (laser radar) and bathymetric technologies were being combined to create 3D “virtual ecosystems” to model how certain chemicals may interact or will be distributed in a particular environment. Demographic information can also be overlaid in these models and used to assess any likely impacts on human health.
Whilst technology can undoubtedly play a significant role in improving monitoring and detection in the future, Professor Depledge voiced concerns that policy and regulatory responses were lagging behind. Current legislation often focuses on the need to monitor individual chemicals in the environment rather than taking an ecosystem approach which favours the use of new technologies. With the focus shifting toward assessments of the cumulative impacts of chemicals amongst organisations such as the Environment Agency, legislation needs to framed in such a way as to ensure it is encouraging the use of improved technologies and new scientific knowledge in monitoring and assessing these threats.
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