Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 1199–1201, 2014 # 2014 SETAC Printed in the USA
Editorial UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME’S GLOBAL MERCURY PARTNERSHIP: SCIENCE FOR SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MINAMATA CONVENTION
objective of the Minamata Convention [1]. The convention text also contains a specific article that addresses differential exposure to mercury and specific sub-populations at risk, including indigenous peoples. Additionally, control measures for artisanal and small-scale gold mining and the supply and storage of mercury and mercury wastes were identified as priority areas of concern. As a separate article within the convention text, controls on mercury emissions and releases are included with special economic and financial provisions to accommodate developing countries [1]. Identifying mercury-contaminated sites also remains an important issue for policy makers, regulators, and other stakeholders, given the importance of historical emissions and residence time (i.e., legacy effects) in the global mercury cycle. The Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) officially joined the GMP in January 2011 and has since played an active role in the partnership, with some members serving as observers in negotiations of the INC and the development of the Minamata Convention. The set of papers presented in this special section in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry represents the inaugural effort of the SETAC coordinated initiatives and addresses several areas of policyrelevant mercury science, including global environmental change [6], epigenetics [7], fish [8] and human exposure [9], and mercury interactions with plankton [10] and macrophytes [11]. While the text of the Minamata Convention focuses on human health protection, current research shows that a successful implementation of the convention should consider biogeochemical, ecological, and ecotoxicological issues that are mentioned only marginally in the convention text and exemplified in the contributions to this special section. The Global Mercury Observation System (GMOS), an important component of the UNEP GMP, will be a key resource in integrating human and environmental health issues during implementation of the Minamata Convention. The GMOS works cooperatively with several long-term international monitoring and research networks [12,13] and maintains mercury concentration data for several abiotic and biotic matrices, including air, water, and organisms from terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The GMOS also supports a wide array of global mercury modeling and validation efforts. Biomonitoring of mercury, as it grows to a truly global scale, will increasingly require more coordinated and harmonized efforts, with established protocols and procedures being imminent for new long-term projects. These biomonitoring efforts, in conjunction with complementary terrestrial landcover analyses, will be essential for model validation at local, regional and global scales. The GMOS also has an extensive core infrastructure for interpreting, mapping, and modeling the spatio-temporal distribution of mercury across heterogeneous environments. The GMOS platform is also interoperable and serves as a hub for data exchange among researchers, the public, policymakers, and other stakeholders and will be a critical modeling resource for evaluating the effectiveness of the
The Minamata Convention on mercury is a comprehensive international effort to manage and control mercury on a global scale. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) established the global mercury partnership (GMP) to support the process for developing policies on mercury emissions to the atmosphere and releases to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, on their potential impact on human health, and on possible technological measures to reduce anthropogenic mercury from entering the environment. The UNEP GMP was structured in ad-hoc partnerships to address specific issues that were of concern to policy makers, including reducing mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, mercury control from coal combustion, mercury reduction in the chlor-alkali sector, mercury reduction in products, mercury air transport and fate research, mercury waste management, mercury supply and storage, and mercury in the cement industry [1,2]. The GMP has produced a number of technical reports that supported an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) in drafting the Minamata Convention. As part of this effort, the assessment of mercury emissions from anthropogenic and natural sources has been an important task of the GMP. In particular, the Mercury Fate and Transport partnership estimated the global emissions of mercury. The annual emissions of anthropogenic mercury to air were estimated at >2000 metric tons [3,4]. The principal sources were identified to be from fossil fuel combustion and other anthropogenic sources to air, soil, and water, including gold mining (large-scale and artisanal small scale), cement production, non-ferrous metal industries, iron and steel production, waste management, cremation, wastes from the chlor-alkali industry, and mercury production. It is hypothesized, although highly uncertain, that re-emitted mercury from soils and aquatic ecosystems presently contributes about twothirds of global emissions to the atmosphere, with estimates of mercury evasion from terrestrial and water (oceans and lakes) surfaces being about 2430 t/yr and 2780 t/yr, respectively [3,5]. Because mercury is a potent neurotoxin and a ubiquitous, globally transported pollutant of concern, a formal program was established by UNEP, and in 2007 the UNEP governing council supported further action on mercury pollution, including the development and review of new and existing legal instruments. The identification of the need for a global, legally binding instrument began in 2009. The INC began drafting the text for such an instrument in 2010 and agreed to the text of the Minamata Convention on Mercury in January 2013 [1]. The Minamata Convention was then opened for signature at the Conference of Plenipotentiaries on 10 and 11 October 2013 in Kumamoto, Japan. To date, it has been signed by 96 countries. Protecting human health and the environment from anthropogenic releases of mercury and its compounds is a primary * Address correspondence to
[email protected]. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/etc.2592 1199
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M.S. Bank et al.
Figure 1. Minamata Disease Victims Memorial, Minamata City, Japan (photograph by M.S. Bank). [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
convention under different emission scenarios coupled with regional scale models [6,12–14]. In this scenario, SETAC has reached an agreement with the GMOS program to support science-based protocols for the submittal of mercury data to the GMOS from ecosystem compartments other than, but not excluding, the atmosphere and to network with our members to encourage expanding the GMOS platform. Establishing uncertainties and improving the mathematical basis, reproducibility, and realism of existing global mercury source–receptor models are paramount to identifying gaps in existing knowledge and for successful implementation of the Minamata Convention. Inventory data on mercury emission sources may also need to be better coupled with an evaluation of their potential for long-range transport. Additionally, novel approaches for assessing mercury and methylmercury in biotic and abiotic matrices through the use of museum specimens have garnered significant interest from the scientific community and policymakers as a means to evaluate exposure, time series data, and source apportionment models at local, regional, and global scales. Museums can serve as a repository for both contemporary and historical specimens (i.e., pre-industrial period) and are often sources of large, reliable abiotic and biotic data sets. Data from museum studies show that mercury bioavailability can be accurately estimated and modeled in conjunction with carbon, nitrogen and mercury stable isotope signatures [15,16] to identify species, habitats, and biophysical regions most likely at risk from mercury pollution in the context of spatial scale, trophic complexity, biodiversity, and global environmental change. The same data also can provide guidelines to establish environmental quality targets for methylmercury and total mercury based on pre-industrial levels. Moving forward, 3 aspects appear critical to the successful implementation of the Convention. First, regulators and policy makers must be made aware that certain ecosystems may be either degraded or at risk despite globally low, and possibly decreasing, mercury levels in some abiotic matrices. This
awareness is needed to ensure that mercury management will continue to be an international priority in the long term to account for legacy effects, residence times, and the overall persistence of mercury in the environment. Second, given the complexity of mercury biogeochemistry, transport, and bioavailability in various ecosystems [17], a globally accepted conceptual framework will be needed to plan appropriate and cost-effective long term, multi-ecosystem monitoring programs. Third, harmonized regulatory tools must be developed or refined to uniformly detect improvements (or lack thereof) of ecosystem and human health at global and regional scales. Effectively addressing these 3 issues and successfully implementing the Minamata Convention require harmonizing efforts among researchers and capacity-building approaches to identify additional data and knowledge gaps. Coordinated efforts to improve the relationship between mercury pollution management, ecotoxicology, and biodiversity are also needed. Developing evidence-based, reproducible, mathematical models, protocols, and procedures to evaluate and validate the GMOS platform for global models will likely be an important step to meet these goals.
Michael S. Bank University of Massachusetts, Department of Environmental Conservation Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Davide A.L. Vignati Universite de Lorraine, LIEC UMR7360 and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Metz, France Bruce Vigon Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Pensacola, Florida, USA
Editorial
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Acknowledgment—The authors are grateful to N. Pirrone and an anonymous referee for providing suggestions and comments on a previous version of this manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. REFERENCES 1. United Nations Environment Programme. 2013. Minamata Convention on Mercury: Text and Annexes. Nairobi, Kenya. 2. United Nations Environment Programme. 2009. Overarching Framework of the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership. Nairobi, Kenya, [cited 2014 February 15]. Available from: http://www.unep.org/chemicalsandwaste/Portals/9/Mercury/Documents/Overarching%20Framework. pdf. 3. Pirrone N, Cinnirella S, Feng X, Friedli HR, Levine L, Pacyna J, Pacyna EG, Streets DG, Sundseth K. 2010. Chapter 3: Emissions. In Pirrone N, Keating T, eds, Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution 2010—Part B: Mercury. Air Pollution Studies No 18. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Geneva, Switzerland. 4. Pirrone N, Mason RP, eds. 2009. Mercury Fate and Transport in the Global Atmosphere: Emissions Measurements and Models. Springer, New York, NY, USA. 5. Corbitt ES, Jacob DJ, Holmes CD, Streets DG, Sunderland EM. 2011. Global source-receptor relationships for mercury deposition under present-day and 2050 emissions scenarios. Environ Sci Technol 45:10477–10484. 6. Selin NE. 2014. Global change and mercury cycling: Challenges for implementing a global mercury treaty. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1202– 1202 (this issue). 7. Basu N, Goodrich JM, Head J. 2014. Ecogenetics of mercury: From genetic polymorphisms and epigenetics to risk assessment and decisionmaking. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1248–1258 (this issue).
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8. Vijayaraghavan K, Levin L, Parker L, Yarwood G, Streets D. 2014. Response of fish tissue mercury in a freshwater lake to local, regional, and global changes in mercury emissions. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1238–1247 (this issue). 9. Višnjevec AM, Kocman D, Horvat M. 2014. Human mercury exposure and effects in Europe. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1259–1270 (this issue). 10. Le Faucheur S, Campbell PGC, Fortin C, Slaveykova VI. 2014. Interactions between mercury and phytoplankton: Speciation, bioavailability, and internal handling. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1211–1224 (this issue). 11. Cosio C, Flück R, Regier N, Slaveykova VI. 2014. Effects of macrophytes on the fate of mercury in aquatic systems. Environ Toxicol Chem 33:1225–1237 (this issue). 12. Global Mercury Observation System. 2014. GMOS: Global Mercury Observation System. [cited 2014 February 15]. Available from: http:// www.gmos.eu. 13. Pirrone N, Aas W, Cinnirella S, Ebinghaus R, Hedgecock I, Pacyna J, Sprovieri F, Sunderland EM. 2013. Toward the next generation of air quality monitoring: Mercury. Atmos Environ 80:599–611. 14. Nativi S, Mazzetti P, Craglia M, Pirrone N. 2014. The GEOSS solution for enabling data interoperability and integrative research. Environ Sci Poll Res 21:4177–4192. 15. Vo AE, Bank MS, Shine JP, Edwards SV. 2011. Temporal increase in organic mercury in an endangered pelagic seabird assessed via centuryold museum specimens. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108:7466–7471. 16. Day RD, Becker PR, Donard OFX, Pugh RS, Wise SA. 2014. Environmental specimen banks as a resource for mercury and mercury isotope research in marine ecosystems. Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts 16:10–27. 17. Bank MS, ed. 2012. Mercury in the Environment: Pattern and Process. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA.
