Climate change effects on POPs’ environmental behaviour: a scientific perspective for future regulatory actions

Since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, international efforts were aimed at limiting global change, and at managing and reducing its inevitable impacts. The growing concern on climate change related issues lead to create international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, and to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change aimed at studying climate evolution and at defining common actions through the adoption of joint climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. From the time when international Task Forces, projects and programs were shared in order to deal with the reduction of environmental exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), international organisations have also been committed to estimate how climate change may affect POPs’ environmental behaviour and distribution. In this review paper, we report the track of POPs’ regulation efforts driven towards decreasing POPs’ environmental concentrations through reducing or banning POP emissions in the environment. We also report scientific studies on climate change related effects on POPs’ environmental behaviour in order to feature how climate change is influencing POPs’ fate and transport. Our final aim is to identify how POPs–related regulations may take into account climate change in managing current or future POPs sources. We find in several case studies on this topic that climate change is considered to contribute to enhance POPs’ long–range transport and that remote areas are considered likely to be the most impacted by POPs’ pollution under a climate change perspective. Our findings also consider that continuous monitoring programs oriented towards the observation of secondary POP sources and the enhancement of inventories reporting primary and secondary POP emissions are useful in dealing with POPs’ exposure under climate change scenarios. We also suggest how communication between science and regulation should be driven towards considering climate change effects into chemicals’ legislation.