Global approaches to assessing, monitoring, mapping, and remedying soil pollution
- PDF / 155,166 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 228 Views
Global approaches to assessing, monitoring, mapping, and remedying soil pollution Natalia Rodríguez Eugenio & Ravi Naidu & Claudio Massimo Colombo
Received: 31 July 2020 / Accepted: 31 July 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
The world’s soil resources are subject to anthropogenic overexploitation exacerbated by environmental pressures caused by climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. The latest estimates done by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations indicate that around one-third of the world’s soils are suffering some degree of degradation. In addition, increased production, use and disposal of synthetic chemicals, and mobilization of trace elements and other raw materials by anthropogenic activities have loaded soils with a great variety and load of contaminants, such that they have become one of the largest environmental reservoirs of pollution. Thousands of different chemicals are used daily and global estimates indicate that the use of chemicals other than pharmaceuticals will rocket by 2030. Considering the current state of soil resources and This article is part of the Topical Collection on Global Approaches to Assessing, Monitoring, Mapping and Remedying Soil Pollution N. R. Eugenio (*) Global Soil Partnership, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] R. Naidu Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRCCARE), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. M. Colombo Agriculture, Environment and Food Department, Università del Molise, Campobasso, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
the trends in societal development and consumption of chemicals, it seems clear that soil pollution is and will be one of the greatest threats to environmental and human health in the coming decades. Soils have the intrinsic capacity to retain, filter, buffer, and degrade organic and inorganic contaminants. This means that the presence of contaminants in the soil does not become evident until their concentration is such as to be harmful to ecosystems and humans, making it a hidden threat. Soil properties that control the fate of contaminants have a high spatial variability and can be modified over time by soil management practices. Similarly, the spatial distribution of pollution sources is highly variable and depends on human and environmental factors. The complexity of the soil matrix and the interactions between it, living organisms and contaminants, make it a challenging task to identify and quantify the various contaminants and the forms in which they are found, which will influence both their toxicity and mobility between environmental compartments. Not only is the evaluation of soil pollution and risk assessment a major challenge, but also its control and remediation is one of the major concerns of humankind. Soil pollution remediation techniques are often costly and technically complex, and continuous innovation
Data Loading...
