Environmental assessment and how it works with PFAS

Have you ever wondered, how statements such as “Baltic Sea is in a bad ecological status” and “The environmental pollution of THIS or THAT substance is high and widespread” come to be? Where does this information come from? Well, wonder no more!

For any strong statement about environmental effects, an assessment of the situation needs to be carried out. In a regional level, such as for the Baltic Sea, this would mean the following things are needed:

• Well-planned and harmonised monitoring systems in place in each country around the sea, measuring the same parameters with the same methodologies from similar samples collected in a similar manner.
• A way to collect, quality check and unify all the data from these monitoring systems and make it accessible for any further uses.
• Widely accepted limit or threshold values, that would mark the boundary between good and bad status, or over which something would be considered “polluted”.

In the Baltic Sea region, these three parts of the assessment system are very well developed in general, especially for legacy hazardous substances such as heavy metals, which have been around for a while and have well-understood dangers for human and ecosystem health. With newer substances, such as many of the organic micropollutants, the system can have major gaps due to the lack of unified understanding of the issue.

The Interreg Baltic Sea Region co-funded project EMPEREST aimed to tackle one of these issues. The output 2.1 of the project was aptly called “Methodological recommendations for the monitoring and assessment of PFAS in the aquatic environment”, which as you can guess from the title, investigated the issue of the so-called “forever chemicals” and their current assessment in the Baltic Sea region.

Long story short – our understanding of the potential health issues these substances can cause has increased significantly, meaning a change has been proposed on the EU level about how many of these substances should be monitored and what the new threshold values should be. Changes in environmental assessment often happen in an “top-down” way – a new proposal for limit values needs the monitoring systems to be changed, which also means the databases and tools used for data management need an update.

This is process is currently happening with PFAS, and the aforementioned output looked into some of the most important gaps in each of these three sections of monitoring and assessment and proposed methodological recommendations for them. The project also carried out a sample assessment based on these recommendations, to show a preliminary picture of how the status of PFAS in the Baltic Sea area would be with these new methodological changes. As this assessment was preliminary however, precaution should still be used with claims like “PFAS pollution in the Baltic Sea fish is at a dangerous level”. For any official statements this kind of assessment would need to be carried out in a verified and highly protocolled way and have the agreement of the different countries in our region.

HELCOM, the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, carries out such highly controlled assessments every 6 years. This process is called holistic assessments (HOLAS) and the preparations of the 4th iteration of this have just started. As one of the major milestones for the EMPEREST project, the HELCOM countries have officially agreed to start the work on an updated PFAS indicator for the whole sea area in the upcoming HOLAS process on the basis of the project output and described methodologies. The project was also invited to similar PFAS assessment discussions held for OSPAR, the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, meaning some of the results of the project have already been transferred to our neighbouring regions and might influence the future assessment of PFAS for a wide number of different countries in Europe.

For us, it means that a lot of work and harmonisation is still on the horizon, to make sure all three parts of the monitoring and assessment system get updated accordingly as soon as possible. At the same time however, this means the work of the EMPEREST project will one day in the near future reach a verified statement on the PFAS pollution in the Baltic Sea. And based on our preliminary assessment already carried out, this statement will most likely show that PFAS is a major problem in the region and the topic needs more actions on the societal level to have any way to be alleviated in the future.