Objective
A.BACKGROUND
The concentration level of pollution is not the only parameter defining the quality of terrestrial and aquatic environments. In fact, these systems exist in a delicate balance controlled by physical, chemical and biological parameters, that are dynamically responding to natural and anthropogenic influences. The traditional approach of bringing pollutant load to permitted concentration levels has to some extent created an inappropriate way of handling environmental risks. Alternative approaches need to be developed so that determination of concentration of a limited number of pollutants, will be combined with toxicity testing by which the total effect of both the "known" and the "unknown" (i.e. chemicals not identified or not evaluated toxicologically) load of pollutants, as well as their toxic interactions can be addressed. Further more the complex relationships of the range of processes determining pollution load and its impact on the quality of life also have to be addressed. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the system, it is nowadays still not clear: i) which parameters govern the environmental risk of the presence of pollutants in soil and aquifer systems, ii) what are the generic methodologies that need to be adopted to estimate those parameters; and iii) how appropriate information should be implemented in the decision making process, to avoid environmental risks and to protect soil and water resources from further deterioration. However, there exists a general consensus that appropriate estimators of environmental risks of the presence of pollutants in the water phase of natural porous media should be based on the present know-how of hydrologists, soil scientists, hydrogeologists, geochemists, ecotoxicologists and analytical chemists. For pragmatic purposes, this know-how should be
summarised in the form of integrated indicators addressing the environmental quality of water in natural porous media. There are several environmental impact assessment methods, which can be distinguished in two categories as follows: methods, which use models to predict environmental fate and potential risk for the environment and categorical indices of impacts. The former allows flux, concentrations, residence times and exposure of contaminants to be estimated, the latter consists of a generic indexing system in which biologically or ecologically-significant threshold levels are used to define categories of impact, hazard or risk.
The present approach to evaluate the risk of soil and groundwater pollution based on measured total concentration of a limited number of contaminants in the soil and water is insufficient. Determination of the availability of a contaminant in the soil, subsoil and aquifer systems for target organisms and determination of its impact on the quality of life (uptake by vegetation, interaction with aquatic and terrestrial life, evaluation of toxic effects, leaching in subsurface water bodies, etc.) gives a better approach. Knowledge of contaminant fate and transport, its bioavailability for target organisms and the bioaccumulation in food chains is present, but needs to be further integrated in coherent framework for assessing effectively the environmental risk. This integration has not yet been sufficiently developed.
The COST Action framework offers good possibilities to investigate significant indicators of the impact of soil and water pollution problems in Europe. It is possible to build on knowledge that has already been collected in the recent past. The "Integrated indicators" COST Action must elaborate an alternative to "concentration" as the main indicator of pollution taking into consideration the integration of the physical, chemical and biological alteration of the system.
The envisaged indicators should be robust and effective in protecting soil and groundwater from a further deterioration. They should support the development of environmental management and mitigation strategies protecting terrestrial and aquatic environments from the
risks of pollution loads. They should be based on a profound knowledge of the fate and impact of water pollution in natural porous media, and how this operates at different scales. This necessitates i) close collaboration between different European laboratories, ii) exchange and coherent interpretation of soil and groundwater monitoring data in terms of environmental and ecotoxicological risks, and iii) improvement of the validation status of pollutant fate and reactive transport models. This research requires a multi-disciplinary approach, since many scientific fields are involved in the development of integrated indicators. The creation of a network through a COST Action will attempt to realise this scientific goal at the European scale. This Action will mostly include applied and pragmatic research, since the latter is the ultimate basis for helping in decision-making and setting up rules. However, close links with fundamental research will be maintained.
The COST Action is in line with the objectives of the Fifth Framework Programme, but does not overlap seriously with the concerted actions and sponsored networks (CLARINET, NICOLE, SCALFRAC, Pore-to Core, FRACFLOW, FAMEST). Information exchange and interaction through cooperation among the Working Groups of the COST Action and the relevant networks would be mutually beneficial, and it is a strict requirement for the Management Committee of the COST Action. International coordination of ongoing research activities in the signature countries would help to eliminate unnecessary duplications of the national research programs as well as the related EU sponsored research. The COST Action would assist in delivering the current results of this specific research field to a larger scientific society and to the end users.
B.OBJECTIVES AND BENEFITS
The main objective of the Action is to improve the scientific base for the development of integrated indicators of the environmental risks created by presence of pollutants in water with emphasis on the water body of natural porous media. Natural porous media are considered to be soils, subsoil vadose zones, and aquifer systems. Pollutants are considered to be substances of anthropogenic origin present at concentrations that produce adverse effects on any organism such as nutrients, pesticides, hazardous substances, organic chemicals and solvents, organometalic, radionucleic and organic waste. Under this COST action an effort will be made to address both the "known" and the "unknown" fraction. Establishment of a set of integrated indicators to evaluate the pollution status and risk of the European water resources will aid environmental agencies, administration and regulators considerably and profit the society as a whole. The developed tools will facilitate the implementation of the Framework Water Directive.
B.1.Secondary objectives. The secondary objectives are:
- the design of a web page which will facilitate the exchange of information via different forums and which may have links with similar initiatives in USA, Japan and other countries in the world;
- the establishment of an operational network of expertise (centre of excellence, reference laboratories, representative scenarios, standard methods, databases) and means committed to this research topic, as a basis for the analysis of the state-of-the-art in Europe. The database will list the expert addresses, research potential, and features that partners envisage to share in cooperation with other European partners. Partner references will be compiled into a network database that will be made available on the
web site of the action. This will be an efficient consulting support tool for end-users belonging to public services, professional organisations and industries, faced with the problems of contaminant loading in natural porous media;
- the harmonisation of the procedure and/or the definition of guidelines to manage the environment and to carry out the risk assessment;
- the exchange of scientists through short-term scientific missions that has been shown very useful in bringing together scientific know-how and implementing analytical methodology into other European laboratories;
- to set up a battery of cost-effective tests including toxicity tests to assess pollution loads and its possible effects, thus the development and improvement of those laboratory and field methods which are essential for predicting and assessing the hazards involved by qualitative and quantitative transfer of the chemicals, their residues and transformation products to aquatic environments;
- the analysis of the feasibility of bringing into the European regulations, the new concept of integrated indicators, that would include the requirements for optimum equilibrium between the spread of toxic products in the environment and the necessary protection of natural resources. Thus, a management instrument can be developed for a continuous evaluation of the effectiveness of the environmental policy towards the target of sustainability and to facilitate the integration of research and monitoring results into the decision-making process.
B.2.Benefits
The envisaged indicators should support the adoption of innovative environmental management and remediation strategies protecting soil, subsoil and water resources from further ongoing deterioration and protecting organisms from risks associated with the presence of pollutants in natural porous media. Such indicators should also be effective and robust, which means that they should be based on the state-of-the-art knowledge of the fate and impact of pollutants in natural porous media, and how this operates at different scales.
The scientific capacity building will be brought about by gathering scientists from different disciplines such as soil science, soil hydrology, hydrogeology, analytical chemistry, geochemistry, ecotoxicology, chemical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and biology concerned with the development of a new concept to protect water from pollution and concerned with reduction of the environmental risks. The multidisciplinary dimension will further be enabled by establishing a programme for scientific research and exchange aiming to characterise and study the processes which control the fate and dispersion of pollutants in natural porous media, as well as the ecotoxicological effects and this at different spatio-temporal scales.
C.SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME
This COST Action will be embedded into a working group structure allowing specific issues related to the development of integrated indicators to be addressed. The scientific programme of these working groups will be elaborated in detail in the initial phase of the action, and will consider:
1. the development of alternative and innovate approaches for characterising the pollution level and pollution hazard of water in natural porous media. The new approaches should offer an alternative to the classical physico-chemical determination of the contaminant level, by integrating in the scheme toxicity testing, addressing therefore both the loads and the effects. This can improve both the detection capabilities and the cost- effectiveness of monitoring and investigation activities. (Working Group Alternative Evaluation Methods);
2.the development of innovative strategies, combining the aforementioned new approaches for characterising contaminant load with the more classical approaches, into cost-effective monitoring schemes of the quality of the European subsurface water bodies (Working Group Monitoring Networks);
3.the development of improved methods for estimating the fate of contaminants in subsurface porous media (Working Group Biogeochemical Dynamics From Soil To Groundwater);
4.the development of improved methods for estimating the transport, dispersion, retardation and/or degradation from pollution sources towards target organisms (Working Group Modelling Of Reactive Transport In Soil and Subsoil);
5.the development of procedures to integrate into quality assessment indicators, data on contaminant load as inferred from appropriate monitoring and predictions on the fate and dispersion of the contaminant load (Working Group Quality Assessment Indicators);
6.the adoption of the quality indicators to support decisions on remediation of pollutant plumes in subsurface soil and groundwater bodies, if needed (Working Group Natural Attenuation versus Alternative Remediation Schemes).
C.1.WG-1: Working Group Alternative Evaluation Methods
C.1.1.Rationale & Scientific interest: Soil and sediment contamination and the disposal of effluents and sludge are considered as major sources of diffuse pollution and a continuing threat to water quality. In many Mediterranean countries where water deficiency is becoming a major problem, treated waste water is reused or used to recharge the aquifer with the potential to threaten its quality. Integrated monitoring must be applied both for the discharged effluents or sludge as well as for the receiving environment in order to prevent and evaluate holistically environmental threats. Existing monitoring activities throughout Europe are however associated with the following three major problems which need urgently to be addressed. These problems are 1 i) high cost/low efficiency and effectiveness, ii) deficiencies in the information gained, (300-350 millions ECU are spent for monitoring water quality in EU, but still the information gain is not sufficient), and iii) lack of harmonisation throughout Europe. The first two problems are mainly related to the inherent shortcomings of the traditional physico - chemical monitoring, due to: a) the effects of chemicals that may occur below analytical detection limits, b) toxicants or metabolites that may not be identified or toxicologically evaluated and c) potential chemical interactions like additive, synergistic or antagonistic effects which can not be identified chemically. Because of these shortcomings, a huge number of pollutants remain undetected. It has been estimated by the USA-EPA that 80-90% of water pollutants cannot be addressed solely by chemical methods.
This fraction of "undetected pollutants" has to be addressed at least by assessing their acute or long-term toxic effects and interactions (e.g. synergistic effects).
Toxicity testing therefore, integrated with chemical testing, has to be an essential component of effective monitoring, providing the basis for forecasting possible effects on the ecosystem and for identification of emerging pollution at an early stage of its development. Emission standards, compliance monitoring of industrial discharges and environmental monitoring of receiving waters should therefore be shift from an exclusive analysis of a limited number of chemical parameters, towards its combination with toxicity testing. There are considerable efforts in different countries like UK, Netherlands, Austria, Cyprus, France, Sweden and Ireland, to integrate toxicity in their monitoring and compliance schemes. But still "the toxicity issue" is missing from the environmental legislation in most European countries. Two are two main reasons: a) lack of uniform criteria and b) the high cost of traditional toxicity tests.
C.1.2.Aims and Objectives: the WG-1 is aiming to contribute in solving the above problems and to fulfil existing gaps in the field of methods, tests, criteria and evaluation by developing a methodological concept applicable for an integrated evaluation of soil, surface and ground water.
Within this COST Action, WG-1 will provide technical support and tools to the other Working Groups in particular WG-2 Monitoring Networks and WG-5 Quality Assessment Indicators.
In order to achieve this task, the specific objectives of the WG-1 are:
- To integrate advanced chemical analytical methodology with biological testing: issues like the use of group chemical parameters, biomimic extraction, toxicity and mutagenicity tests and tests for endocrine disrupters will be considered;
- To evaluate, develop/ improve existing laboratory and field methods;
- To evaluate and select cost-effective toxicity tests, e.g. microbiotests, to be included in a "battery" to comply with the overall goal of the FW Directive that is, preservation of good ecological status;
- To develop tools for aggregated and synthetic evaluation of results and information to address biological, chemical and microbiological quality of the soil and water system;
- To organise workshops on the integration of chemical, microbiological and biological methods for soil, water, and sediments and the development of Cost-effective Tier Approach applicable for an integrated evaluation of soil, surface and ground water.
C.2.WG-2: Working Group Monitoring Networks
C.2.1.Rationale & Scientific interest: In the EU member countries monitoring studies are carried out mainly to obtain an assessment of the environment contaminant load in compliance with the requirements of the European Union and national regulations: as monitoring of water, soil and air. For research purposes and in order to study the contaminant fate in the ecosystems monitoring could be planned to individuate point and no-point source of contamination and the studies are characterised by several factors: the pollutant characteristics, the scale of the space involved, the environments which account for the object of the study.
When applied to the environmental quality such monitoring plans are directly dependent upon the adequacy and reliability of the sampling. The regulation of the monitoring plans for the different situations is not always achieved within the legal and the administrative structure: technical standards for specific purposes may be issued directly by a Federal Institution (e.g. CNR-IRSA in Italy for sampling tap water quality), or International Agencies such as ISO. Final recommendations are usually issued by bodies specifically appointed for this purpose, such as Research Institutes or even individual experts, and may not be necessarily published. None of those covers all of the above-reported contamination. As a result, Public Authorities responsible for the surveillance of the territory can not adequately cope with these issues and too often if they intervene they incur in high costs without getting tangible results. This is the evidence of the necessity to define guidelines for the monitoring of each no-point contamination and point contamination occurring in the fields, watersheds and, at a regional scale respecting the very varying natural and technical conditions of those.
C.2.2.Aims and Objectives: to achieve this task the specific objectives of the WG-2 are:
- Classification of the main substances and activities which may cause point and no-point potential and/or existing contamination, the scale of the space at which contamination may occurs in the soil and water of the European territory;
- Development of guidelines including the following aspects: sampling system, purpose and strategy of the monitoring & sampling; environmental conditions at the time of sampling; safety, hygiene and quality assurance; sampling programme; sampling equipment; sampling techniques; field characterisation, transport, storage and handling of the samples; use of the statistics, models and GIS;
- Integration of the monitoring programmes of the soil-water quality with the hazard assessment of the no-target organisms;
- Cost-effective optimisation throughout the use of the models and statistics for the planning the sampling schedules as well as for the evaluation of the results reliability and general economics;
- Classification and evaluation of the available sampling methodologies;
- Harmonisation of the results to be used in the following risk assessment steps (meant to be used for toxicological assessments).
C.3.WG-3: Working Group Biogeochemical Dynamics from Soil to Groundwater
C.3.1.Rationale & Scientific interest: Soil and water are contaminated by a wide range of pollutants, from the inorganic heavy metals to organic solvents or pesticides or the organo-metallic complexes. For most of these substances there is a lack of understanding of the sorption, mobility and persistence in a natural environment. Some information is available from laboratory studies. Experimental studies on transport in columns show the complexity of reactions these pollutants may undergo on their passage through soil, subsoil and groundwater. For example, different redox conditions will change speciation and decay products. This will result in different mobility and persistence of the pollutant or its derivative. Although the thermodynamics are quite often well known, the role of micro-organisms is often unclear. The mobility is determined by the kinetics, which is mostly unknown for the abovementioned reactions. Field studies are carried out at several areas 1. These field sites are well studied and give the opportunity of a coordinated research for European scientists.
C.3.2.Aims and Objectives: This working group will concentrate on the study of processes that influence the sorption and mobility and persistence of pollutants in groundwater and the input pathways of the pollutant to the groundwater. It is essential to form a multi-disciplinary group of soil scientist, microbiologists, hydrogeologists, chemists to address this topic. Laboratory studies, their design and comparability will be scientifically compared and evaluated. The most important will be the evaluation of experiments regarding the transferability of their results to field sites or field results. This change in length scale is also inducing a change in scale for the hydraulic system, the chemical system, and the microbiological system in their specific reactions. There are a lot of data for the laboratory batch scale, some on the laboratory column scale, few on the lysimeter scale and hardly data on the field scale. A comparison of the data from different scales is often impossible because of the unknown processes and their scale dependence.
The aim of this working group should be to develop strategies for designing field and laboratory studies, which allow the transfer of results. It might be impossible to transfer all laboratory results directly to the field, but it should be possible to evaluate laboratory results regarding their field validity, what processes studied in the laboratory are significant at the field scale, and how we can study field scale processes in a laboratory study. The results will yield a better interpretation of existing data.
The knowledge of the fate of pollutants in soil, subsoil and groundwater at different scales and the evaluation of field data will allow an overall knowledge about pollutants behaviour. Furthermore, cooperation with the other Working Groups will help to find which measures to take for the protection of soil and groundwater from pollution.
In other words the objective is to improve the understanding of the interaction between chemical reactions and transport of pollutants. Processes such as sorption, precipitation, redox-reactions, biodegradation, and colloidal transport should be studied in different scales, from the molecular to the megascale. The gap of knowledge between the scale should be made as small as possible.
C.4.WG-4: Working Group Modelling of Reactive Transport in Soil and Subsoil
C.4.1.Rationale & Scientific interest. Political consideration: For many years major efforts have been devoted to the protection of the groundwater resources. The biggest difficulty has been to find a procedure to evaluate the real risk of the subsoil water supply resources. Most European nations use groundwater resources for their drinkable waters. Society needs to be able, and in particular the administration has to be able, to reconcile industrial development with the assurance of public safety. Many institutions have tried to build a system to forecast the pollution fate and impact on the groundwater. Many models are available in the market, but they are generally more suitable for the use in one of the considered ambient (soil or subsoil). The real problem to face always has been to couple the soil and subsoil transport and dispersion of contaminants, with a serious approach to both the transport and the soil interaction phenomena. In fact in most cases the larger effort is devoted or to the chemical part or to the transport one. The COST Action can instead give the opportunity to scientists coming from different sciences to cooperate together to furnish guidelines for the possible users interested in this problem.
Socio-economical considerations: The aim is to give to public administration and to research institutes or laboratories, standard tools or methodology for the analysis of the transport at the different scales (lab and field) of pollutants, taking into account the interactions with soil and sub-soils and to the same time the thermodynamic properties of the environment. This is important either for evaluating the risk of contamination of groundwater or of soils and or for the evaluation of the better technology (better in the economical and in terms of objectives senses) for the site remediation. The aim could be to furnish a list of models or of procedures which step from the lab scale and reach the field scale giving an answer (with a known approximation degree) to the contamination problems which can be met in the territory, in other words a "list" as it exists for the atmospheric pollution problem.
Scientific interests: In addition, to extend the studies to the soil-groundwater system environment it is necessary to improve the level of knowledge of the simulated processes by means of mathematical models.
C.4.2.Aims and Objectives: to achieve this task the specific objectives of the WG-4 are:
- acquisition and analysis of the existing models of transport and interaction;
- coupling of the simulation of transport and chemical or biological interactions at the different scales with a deeper knowledge of the involved processes which can come from the experience of the expertise involved;
- development of procedures for the models validation;
- development of methods for the optimisation of the used parameters;
- analysis of the condition for the use of other approaches;
- definition of fast protocols for the evaluation of the contamination risks in emergency situations;
- development of an European network for an improvement of the used products based on the different knowledge of the different expertise involved.
C.5.WG-5: Working Group Quality Assessment Indicators
C.5.1.Rationale and scientific interest. Classical chemical testing of water quality parameters, as done in actual monitoring programmes, exhibits a low cost-efficiency ratio. The alternative methods (WG1) will definitely allow the quality assessment of a given soil or water sample to be improved, yet they do not allow the human toxicological, ecotoxicological, environmental or societal risk of the presence of a pollutant in the soil and/or water body to be qualified. Optimised monitoring networks (WG2), will allow the measurement of the status of the soil and water quality within the time and space horizon of the observations to be improved. Yet, they do not allow the evolution of the soil and water quality to be predicted beyond these time and space horizons. These predictions could be done with the improved dispersion reactive transport models (WG3 & WG4), yet any prediction will remain subjected to uncertainty given the intrinsic variability of natural porous media and the processes affecting the pollutant fate. For managing the water resources at the European level in a sustainable way, it is of paramount importance that unbiased and reliable indicators of the water resource quality be available. It is suggested that such indicators are basic instruments for decision-making and implementing sustainable soil and water management options into the European regulation. It is the hypothesis of this working group that powerful indicators can be defined by combining information from chemical and toxicological tests implemented in cost-effective monitoring networks with process-oriented laboratory and field studies and with the outcome of reactive transport models. It is suggested that an intelligent combination of the information inferred from the previously defined methods will result in a range of integrated indicators which will build upon the capacity developed in the previous working groups. It is also suggested that the integration of previous methods in quality assessment indicators will reduce the impact of the drawbacks of the individual methods into the final risk assessment. However, at present it is unclear how the flow of information from chemical and toxicological methods, monitoring data and environmental fat modelling should at best be combined with current available regional information, in order to come up with reliable quality measurement tools. It is also unclear how the uncertainty from the previously defined methods should be considered in order to estimate appropriately human toxicological, eco-toxicological, environmental and societal risks.
C.5.2.Aims and objectives: the main objective of WG 5 is i) to develop a methodological framework allowing information from chemical and toxicological tests, monitoring networks, dispersion transport modelling and regionally available data sources to be merged into practical and reliable quality and risk assessment indicators; and ii) to analyse how these indicators can be implemented into current EU regulation to schedule sustainable soil and water management options. In order to achieve this task, the specific objectives of the working group are:
- To review the current risk assessment procedure as adopted and/or proposed for European legislation. This review will form a basic document, which will allow the progress to be measured in estimating the quality of soil and water resources at the end of this COST action;
- To develop generic methods allowing basic information to merge from different primary sources as for instance inferred from ecotoxicological data, monitoring data, fate and transport simulation results, into synoptic quality assessment indicators;
- To improve the methods for characterising the uncertainty of the integrated quality assessment integrator in terms of the uncertainty of the primary data sources, the chemical and toxicological methods, the monitored data and environmental fate modelling;
- To analyse the feasibility of implementing integrated quality assessment indicators into the EU regulation, and evaluate the likely improvement of the quality assessment as compared with the current risk assessment practice.
C.6.WG-6: Working Group Natural Attenuation versus Alternative Remediation Schemes
C.6.1.Rationale & Scientific interest. The complex nature of the soil system and its relatively rapid dynamics, especially in the case of organic matter, has thwarted the attempt simply to correlate soil properties and content of xenobiotics. Such difficulty that arises from lack of knowledge on the basic processes of the interactions between soil matrix and xenobiotics, especially the organic contaminants, has prevented the solid scientific basis to develop predictive models. It is necessary to fill in the gap of basic knowledge regarding the role that soil, in general, and its inorganic and organic components, in particular, exerts to adsorb and transform organic contaminants, thereby attenuating their impact on water quality.
The interactions of xenobiotics with organic and inorganic soil components are fundamental in reducing their horizontal and vertical mobility in soils and considerably limiting the contamination of both fresh and underground waters. Moreover,