Involved Member: Prof. Kenneth Mei Yee LEUNG

At present, there are over 350,000 registered chemicals. Many of them will be eventually released into the estuaries, which connect human cities to natural oceans. However, little is known about their environmental contamination and ecological risks. For example, our recent findings of pharmaceutical contamination in global rivers published in PNAS suggested that many of the most polluted rivers are located in the countries and regions from sub-Sahara Africa, South America and parts of southern Asia, which are mostly beyond the reach of current research efforts (Wilkinson et al., 2022).

To accommodate the discrepancy, our team has initiated a ten-year “Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM)” Programme (www.globalestuaries.org), which has been endorsed by the United Nations (UN) as an “Ocean Decade Action” under the “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030)” global initiative. It is the only endorsed proposal from Hong Kong and one of the 66 endorsed programmes in the world. We aim to assess the global occurrence and risks of environmental pollutants in the estuaries, prioritise the pollutants and estuaries that require attention and improvement, and develop the best practices to combat the pollution problems for creating cleaner estuaries around the world.

Reference:

Wilkinson, J.L., Boxall, A.B.A., Kolpin, D.W., Leung, K.M.Y., Lai, R.W.S., Galbán-Malagón, C. et al. (2022). Pharmaceutical pollution of the world’s rivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(8), e2113947119.