In Response: Challenges and opportunities for landscape ecotoxicology and spatially explicit risk assessment-An industry perspective

摘要

Methods to quantify and communicate the environmental risk associated with the use of chemicals during their life cycle (production through disposal) have been developed over the past 50 yr. As the science and protection goals developed, more risk-assessment methods have been added (often piecemeal and discipline-focused), leading to guidance becoming ever more comprehensive but also much more complex and in places disjointed. Consequently, current prospective environmental risk-assessment approaches for chemicals were not designed to inform today's complex risk-management decisions, and there is a mismatch between measures of risk and protection goals. For example, it is generally agreed that ecotoxicity, life history, and spatiotemporal distributions of both exposure and populations all influence risk substantially. However, most risk assessments are based on point estimates using ecotoxicological information from laboratory species. Therefore, an integrated approach to address these challenges to transform and harmonize environmental risk assessments is needed. To achieve that, we believe there are 3 key scientific challenges: 1) the definition of protection goals that matter to society and matching measures of risks and benefits, 2) the development and use of accurate and relevant spatially explicit exposure, and 3) mechanistic effects models (e.g., ecological models and toxicokinetic-toxicody-namic models).