New website available

By 2050, the world population will reach nine billion people and three quarters of the global population will live in cities. The development path to 2050 will be marked by shifts in land-use and weather patterns, and by changes in the way water and food resources are obtained and managed all over the world. These global changes (GCs) will affect the emissions, environmental transport pathways and fate of chemicals, and thus affect the exposure of the natural environment to chemicals. Future changes may also alter the sensitivity of ecosystems to chemical exposure.

The ECORISK2050 project "Effects of global change on the emission, fate, effects and risks of chemicals in aquatic ecosystems" brings together a world leading and interdisciplinary consortium of universities, research institutes, industry and regulatory and governmental authorities to deliver a cohort of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs). The project will analyse and address risks of chemicals of emerging concern focusing on scenarios up to 2050.

The coupled training goals and research objectives of the project are:

• Firstly, to assess how the inputs of chemicals from agriculture and urban environments and their fate and transport are affected by different environmental conditions, including those of specific EU regions, and how this will change under GC scenarios in order to assess the likely increase in chemical risks to human and ecosystem health.
• Secondly, to identify potential adaptation and mitigation strategies that can be implemented in the short and medium term, to abate unacceptable changes in risks, and use the GC scenarios to propose robust implementation pathways.
• And lastly to develop a set of tools for use by industry and policy makers, that allow the impacts of a range of GC related drivers on chemicals risks to be assessed and managed.

ECORISK2050 is a Europe wide project funded by the European Union in the framework of the H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie Action – Innovative Training Networks. This project is coordinated by the Wageningen University. The Ecotoxicology group of the IMDEA Water Institute is one of the participants in the consortium that carries out the project.

The new website of the ECORISK2050 project is now available. You can access the web here.

This project received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 program under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813124