The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has awarded £6 million to investigate the effects that potentially hazardous chemicals used by humans are having on UK habitats and wildlife.

The research programme follows on from a workshop co-hosted by NERC last year, including representatives from government, regulation the water companies and industry, which concluded that vital research needs to be done to understand the impact that new chemicals and combinations of chemicals are having on ecosystems and the animals and plants that depend on them.

With new chemicals constantly being used in agriculture, industry and everyday life, the research not only hopes to uncover unforeseen effects, but also to devise a new way for testing the impacts that can be applied to all types of ecosystems found in freshwater, at sea and on land.

The current standard method of testing determines how toxic individual chemicals are but is unable to look at the combined effects of a mixture of chemicals, which can be quite a different picture.

NERC Associate Director of Research Ned Garnett said:

“Healthy and productive terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems are vital to the economy and wellbeing of the UK. They play a key role in areas such as food production, providing clean water, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and supporting sustainable fish stocks, as well as supporting our wildlife. This research will provide new evidence on how chemicals used in farming, industry and everyday life are impacting on these environments.”

The grants were awarded to teams led by Professor Andrew Johnson and Dr David Spurgeon, both of the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), and Professor Guy Woodward at Imperial College, London.

Professor Johnson’s team will seek to identify which wildlife populations are doing well despite current chemical use and which are not. The assessment will be based on Britain's vast long-term wildlife population data and will be examined with respect to chemical exposure as well as a variety of other factors. Hundreds of millions of data records have been gathered over the past 40 years and examination of them for response to chemicals has never been done before on this scale.

Research to consider how emerging chemical threats will interact with effects of climate change

The team led by Professor Guy Woodward is looking to pioneer a framework for assessing and predicting the impact of new chemicals on the environment.

Their project will combine modelling, experimental manipulations and monitoring across a range of freshwater ecosystems that provide crucial services to society, from those driven by microbes at the base of the food web (for example, water purification) to those associated with fishes at the top.

A major component of their work will also involve figuring out how emerging chemical threats will interact with the effects of climate change, like warming and drought.

Professor Woodward commented:

“Currently, we cannot accurately predict the impacts of new chemicals on natural systems, from genes to entire ecosystems, so our aim is to develop novel techniques to bridge this gap. In addition to our own project, we are also very excited to work with the other successful bids in the call to create new complementary approaches and, hopefully, to deliver further benefits across the programme as a whole.”

According to NERC, there are already many tens of thousands of chemicals used in homes, industries and food systems and the market is growing by about 2,000 new compounds per year.

Looking to the future:

• the changing demographics of a globally rising population (and, in developed countries, an increasingly ageing and medicated population) will lead to more drugs discharged through the water systems;
• changing agricultural practices, energy and material needs are likely to lead to new effluents and pressures;
• new pest and disease pressures and increasing resistance to products will alter use of agrochemical and veterinary products;
• green chemistry has the potential to drive the development of novel chemistries in the future;
• and a focus on recycling and reuse will change how we use products and manage waste streams.

The research forms part of NERC’s Emerging Risks of Chemicals in the Environment programme to conduct research to predict how the environment and its functioning will respond to chemical exposure.