LETTERS: The Earth has nine planetary limits that define the point at which human influence on the Earth's processes may jeopardise civilisation.
Recent evidence from a group of experts, including Dr Sarah Cornell of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, indicates that another of these barriers has been crossed — pollution from new chemical entities.
Chemical pollution is the fifth of nine planetary limits that scientists believe have been breached.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, land-system changes and changes in biogeochemical fluxes of elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus are the remaining four.
On the other hand, the global market for synthetic chemicals now has over 350,000 distinct variations, with output expected to skyrocket in the future decades.
These include agricultural pesticides, antibiotics for disease prevention, plastics for almost everything we use and industrial chemicals.
While many of these compounds have been found to harm the natural environment and human health, their interactions and effects are unclear or poorly understood.
The authors of the paper conclude that this important planetary limit has been crossed because the rate at which new entities are generated and produced by industry outpaces governments' capacity to evaluate risk and monitor consequences.
While scientists work to detect and understand the effects of chemicals and other new entities, companies continue to produce them at an alarming pace.
With science lagging behind in risk assessment and governments mostly failing to control chemicals, mankind is flying blind into a future where unintended consequences of chemical pollution might be disastrous.
These cocktails of chemical pollution might threaten the global ecosystem and the challenges are right in front of our eyes now, despite our success with the ozone layer protection in the past decades.
What we need to do now according to the authors is to limit on production and discharge, arguing that pollution endangers the world's ecosystems, which support life.
This would be nothing new in the European Union via Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), but no mechanism is currently in place for the South-East Asian region including Malaysia.
The main issue is that the ever-growing new entities such as plastics are rapidly dispersed from inside human faeces to the Arctic ice and the report notes that despite preventative measures, the number of polluted areas is growing.
Other regulatory measures could be in the form of taxes and financial incentives to encourage firms to produce safe goods that cause no damage and promote "green chemistry" as well as establish an international committee to determine a "reasonable" global ecological footprint and a limit on sovereign nations exceeding that multiplier.
As the end-user, we could use the Internet to educate and empower individuals to become "clean agents" of a global economy based on "green" production, advocate for disease prevention rather than pharmacological "cure" and improve citizen movement for environmental monitoring, assess toxicant levels and actively report contaminated locations.
Producers, on the other hand, could analyse the risks and benefits of employing chemicals in the food chain, detect health implications and remove harmful compounds from food, water, personal care items and home goods production processes.
While immediate modification is required to mitigate the impacts of novel chemical entities, a comprehensive reform of fundamental social systems is always applauded.
However, despite indications that Earth's pollution tolerance limit have been breached, it is hoped that opportunities for improvement can be found soon to address the issue.
DR ZUL ILHAM ZULKIFLEE LUBES
Associate Professor,
Institute of Biological Sciences,
Faculty of Science, Universiti Malaya
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times