Monitoring and on Trends and Effects of Substances in the Marine Environment
As with all OSPAR meetings since March 2020, the Working Group on Monitoring and on Trends and Effects of Substances in the Marine Environment (MIME) was held by videoconference and we were sad not to be able to meet in person. However, whilst online videoconference meetings present all sorts of challenges, there are opportunities, too and this year the usual stalwart MIME participants were joined by experts and guests from Portugal, the Faroes, Finland and the Slovak Republic, as well as by representatives of the AMAP and HELCOM Secretariats. It made for some exciting discussions and initiatives during the week.
Portugal and the Faroes engaged in helpful discussions on data, which will facilitate MIME’s ongoing work to expand the annual hazardous substances assessment by including more substances and more data and to test different assessment criteria and standards. Rob Fryer (United Kingdom) continues to provide an invaluable service in preparing the annual assessments in the OSPAR Hazardous Substances Assessment Tool (OHAT) and MIME is indebted to his efforts. There are core features of OHAT that are common to OSPAR, AMAP and HELCOM, and MIME initiated a new ad hoc contact group with the three Regional Seas Conventions and ICES to look at making the underlying code available for sharing and developing so as to operationalise the whole data-to-assessment system.
Jukka-Pekka Jalkanen (Finland, FMI) presented the EMERGE[1] EU Horizon project, which is studying the effects of different emission reduction solutions for shipping in Europe and to develop effective strategies to decrease the environmental and climatic impacts of shipping.
Jaroslav Slobodnik (Slovak Republic), Coordinator of the NORMAN[2] Network, joined MIME for discussions on identifying contaminants of emerging concern and to further discuss the process for rationalising OSPAR’s List of Chemicals for Priority Action.
As always, the ICES experts who manage OSPAR’s contaminants and eutrophication data made every effort to work with the experts and they were their usual supportive, professional selves.
Finally, MIME was very pleased to elect the following positions for the period 2021-2023:
Chair of MIME, Dag Øystein Hjermann (Norway)
Vice-Chair of Assessment, Martin Mørk Larsen (Denmark)
[1] Evaluation, control and Mitigation of the EnviRonmental impacts of shippinG Emissions – EMERGE
[2] Network of reference laboratories, research centres and related organisations for monitoring of emerging environmental substances