PARENT SESSION

7A (1) - Simulation and Modelling
Hall 9
1:45 PM - 3:30 PM, Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Chair: Jischa, M.¹, ¹
Co-chair: Tulbure, I.², ²

(TU9/15) Modelling Predicted Environmental Concentration of chemicals at European and regional scale using geo-referenced data.

Verdelocco, Stefania¹, Jones, Arwyn ¹, Meharg, Andrew², Paya-Perez, Anna³, ¹ EC Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Ispra, Varese, Italy² University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Grampian, Scotland³ EC Joint Research Centre Institute for Health and Consumer Protection, Ispra, Varese, Italy

ABSTRACT- The 6th Environment Action Programme of the European Community gives a strategic direction to the Commission's environmental policy over the next decade. One of the priority areas identified is "Environment and Health" with the proposal of developing new systems of risk evaluation and management of chemical substances. In this context, the objective of the project is to create a regional risk assessment tool that can be used to evaluate or support policy and management decisions for potentially vulnerable areas in Europe. The European System for the Evaluation of Substances (EUSES) was developed for quantitative assessment of the risk posed by new and existing chemicals. This software contains the calculation processes based on multimedia models. In the regional distribution model the concentrations are calculated considering an "hypothetical" region with standard characteristics and the concentrations are calculated without considering any spatial component. Within the project, EUSES was linked to the digital European Soil Database. Geo-referenced data were used in order to take into account the variability of the Predicted Environmental Concentration (PEC) due to different regional characteristics (i.e. size of the region, organic carbon content of soil, fraction of agricultural, urban and natural soil, precipitations, etc). Based on the main drivers of the model, new calculations were performed and validated using substances with different physico-chemical properties (i.e. nonylphenol, naphthalene, chlorobenzene, DBP, DEHP, etc.). The calculations were performed at European scale and at regional scale. The paper will present the results of these calculations highlighting the differences between the PECs calculated using a standard region and using geo-referenced data.

Key words: pec, euses, risk assessment, multimedia models