Synthetic chemicals as agents of global change

摘要

Around 100 million unique synthetic chemicals have been produced over the past six decades, recently at a rate of about 10 million per year. Since 2000 there has been a clear increase in the rate of global production of chemical substances, with a particularly large increase in low- and middle- income countries. This presentation examines the rate of change in the production and variety of pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other synthetic chemicals over the past four decades. We show that chemical production and diversification, particularly within the developing world, have outpaced other major drivers of global environmental change such as CO_2 emissions, nutrient pollution, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. Sufficient evidence shows stresses on ecosystem and human health at local to global scales suggesting that conditions are transgressing the safe operating space delimited by a planetary boundary for chemical pollution. Though concerns about the proliferation of synthetic chemicals -including pesticides - gave rise to the modern environmental movement in the early 1960s, synthetic chemical pollution has not been included in most analyses of global change. However, despite these trends, mainstream ecological journals, ecological meetings, and ecological funding through the US National Science Foundation devote less than 2% of their journal pages, meeting talks, and science funding, respectively, to the study of synthetic chemicals. Similarly, despite large implied environmental, economic, and human health costs, chemical pollutants have been overlooked in the international development agenda and pollution control currently receives <0.5% of global development spending.