[MUSIC] Hello, my name is Katrin Vorkamp. I'm the senior scientist and environmental chemistry at Aarhus University in Denmark. I have worked with environmental pollution in the Arctic for nearly 20 years. The Arctic was long regarded as a pristine area far away from any sources of pollution and presumably unimpacted by the pollution that we experienced here in Europe and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, slowly people became aware that chemicals emitted at lower latitudes, for example in Europe or North America, could actually reach the Arctic. This was the case for radionuclides, for example from Sellafield and the Arc for metals from metal industries, and for organic contaminants, the so-called persistent organic pollutants. This makes the Arctic a recipient of global pollution. The pollutants accumulate in the cold environment of the Arctic. They're present in food chains, and later contaminant exposure of people in the Arctic relying on the traditional food, which is rich in energy and nutrients and has served them well for hundreds of years. The pollutants also accumulate in the ice of the Arctic. With climate change, the ice begins to melt and the contaminants that were trapped decades ago are released again into the surrounding environment. So the Arctic, which has been a sink for many years, now becomes a source of pollutants, the secondary source of pollutants. Some of which were banned decades ago for good reasons. In recognition of the global dimension of Arctic environmental pollution, ministers of the Arctic countries started to meet and discuss these issues at the end of the 1980s when the Cold War ended. This led to the adoption of the Arctic Environmental Protection strategy in Rovaniemi in Finland. This international collaboration led to the formation of the Arctic Council and its six working groups shown here at the bottom of this slide. One of them is AMAP, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program. AMAP publishers regular reports with an assessment of the extent and development of Arctic pollution in a circumpolar perspective. One issue of Arctic environmental pollution is that of the persistent organic pollutants, abbreviated as POPs. These are organic chemicals that are persistent, meaning that they cannot be easily degraded in the environment. They are bioaccumulative, which means that they accumulate in plants, animals and humans. They are toxic, and they can be transported over long distances. And that's how they reach the Arctic. In the Arctic, these POPs can accumulate in food chains. This can lead to contaminant exposure of people in the Arctic relying on traditional food harvest. Then the figure in the middle shows the process of biomagnification. Biomagnification means that, with each level of the food chain, the concentration of POPs increases roughly speaking. So if we move to the right in this figure, we move up in the food chain, and we find higher concentrations of POP s in the enemas at this level. So if you eat an animal that is high in the food chain, a seal, for example, you will inevitably also take in a certain amount of POPs. And this effect is then shown in the last figure in this slide. It shows concentrations of two POPs in blood samples of people from the Arctic and from Europe. The blue bars show people from Greenland. And the gray bar stand for people from Europe. And in both cases, as you can see, the Inuit people from Greenland have higher concentrations of POPs in their blood. POPs are regulated globally today through a Convention of the United Nations. It's called Stockholm Convention on POPs, and it entered into force in 2004. Most of the Arctic countries have established monitoring programs to check if the concentrations of POPs decrease in the Arctic environment as they should following the international regulations. In Denmark and Greenland, we have a program that's called AMAP Core Programme. In this program we monitor the concentration of POPs in key species of the Arctic, but we also monitor heavy metals and chemicals of emerging Arctic concern. These graphs show monitoring results for PCBs in ringed seals from Greenland, from the coast of Central West Greenland and Central East Greenland. All the samples are analyzed in our lab in Denmark. They are collected by local hunters in Greenland as part of the traditional subsistence hunt. In both cases, as you can see the PCB concentrations decreased significantly over time. The main decrease actually happened prior to the global regulation 2004, probably as a result of national initiatives. With POPs regulated and decreasing in the Arctic environment, the question arises, what other contaminants can be found in the Arctic? This includes a number of replacement chemicals. So those that replace the chemicals that were formally banned because of environment and health concerns. One example, I will show here relates back to the PCBs. PCBs are banned as industrial chemicals. But certain PCB molecules can be formed unintentionally in industrial manufacturing processes, for example in the pigment production. PCB11 has also been found in the Arctic, again, as a consequence of its environmental stability and long-range transport. This graph here shows concentrations in an ice core from Svalbard in Norway, where PCB11 was detected and even increased towards the surface in the most recent layer. Another group of significant pollutants in the Arctic are the heavy metals, in particular mercury. Mercury occurs naturally, and it is emitted to the atmosphere from the geogenic sources like volcanoes, for example, and from biogenic sources such as soil and biomass burning. However, these sources combined are actually smaller than the man-made sources as you can see in this figure. The man-made sources account for about 2,500 tons of mercury every year plus or minus 500 tons. And they have increased by 450% above natural levels compared with historical data. Parts of the anthropogenic mercury also reaches rivers and the sea. And from there it can be emitted to the atmosphere as well. And just like the POPs, mercury can be transported to the Arctic with the atmosphere, with rivers, with ocean currents, and there it can accumulate in food chains, also leading to exposure issues very similarly to the POPs. The main anthropogenic sources of mercury today are the artisanal small scale gold mining and the burning of coal in the energy sector. This figure shows estimated emissions in 2010 and 2015, broken down by various regions. In total, the emissions were roughly 20% higher in 2015 than they have been in 2010. And about half of this increase can be attributed to the artisanal small scale gold mining. However, it is a bit uncertain because it might be a matter of more information that is available today rather than an actual increase in emission. Anthropogenic releases of mercury are now also regulated through a UN convention. It's called UN Minamata Convention on Mercury and it entered into force in 2017. A relatively new topic is the Arctic pollution with plastics and microplastics. Plastics can be transported to the the Arctic from sources outside the Arctic similarly to the POPs, but it can also be released locally within the Arctic, for example from domestic sources and commercial activities such as fishing and tourism. Microplastics are typically small particles with the size of less than five millimeters. They can be present in cosmetics and other products, then we call them primary microplastics. But this use has been restricted in many countries now recently. Microplastics can also be degradation products from larger particles. Then we call them secondary microplastics. In the Arctic, the larger problem seems to be that of larger particles, macroplastics like nets that animals get entangled in or bigger parts of plastics that is swallowed. The Oslo-Paris commission for the protection of the Northeast Atlantic has defined an ecological quality objective, which says that less than 10% of northern fulmars should have more than 0.1 gram of plastic in their stomachs. And AMAP has established a new expert group dedicated to marine litter and macroplastics in the Arctic that is currently developing guidelines for monitoring of plastics and microplastics in the Arctic. So in conclusion, the Arctic is not a pristine area. But it receives pollutants from all over the world. And it releases them again as the Arctic ice melts during a warming climate. The accumulation of persistent organic pollutants and mercury in the Arctic has led to a contaminant exposure of wildlife and people. But international regulations show promising effects of impact reduction. Finally, chemicals of emerging Arctic concern and plastics are new pollutant issues that need similar actions.
