Antarctic environmental banking: the quest for a global approach

Extract

Recent estimates report that more than eight million substances are known and that about 70 000 of them are widely exploited as pesticides, food additives, pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds with a total production of several million tons per year. The global circulation of polluting chemicals is well known to have reached even the Antarctic continent. This has resulted in an enhancement both of the baseline levels of naturally occurring organic and inorganic substances and an increasing presence of man-made compounds that simply should not be there. Localized anthropogenic activities are also contributing to the overall low yet progressive deterioration of the pristine Antarctic conditions. Local pollution may well be alleviated by a full implementation of the Madrid Protocol, but the crucial phenomena of worldwide chemical contamination will continue. To maximize the value of Antarctica as a source of global baseline data cooperative and harmonized approaches need to be adopted at the international level to monitor chemical pollution, thus avoiding useless duplication of effort and maximizing the comparability of data. From this standpoint the importance of the establishment of Antarctic environmental specimen banks cannot be exaggerated. The rationale behind such undertakings is certainly not new: specimen banks have been in operation for twenty years e.g. at the former National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology) in the USA, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and at the Jülich Research Center in Germany.