Table of contents
letter
Dear colleagues,
We invite you herewith to the EIONET and stakeholder consultation of the draft EEA report “Contaminants in Europe’s seas”.
You find the draft report available here:
- INSET LINK
The draft report is supplemented with a comprehensive “Online supplementary material” (annexes), which are available here:
- INSERT LINK
An online form for the delivery of the comments is available in the same folder as the report. The online form will allow providing comments on chapters and sections of the report.
EEA ask member countries to provide a consolidated country response and only upload one set of comments per EEA member countries. EEA´s primary networks are the Eionet NRCs on marine (see Links at the bottom of this mail). Providing comments require an Eionet account. In case you have forgotten your EIONET Account credentials, you can recover them using this form:
- For decades, European countries have shared a common vision of a marine environment with close to zero concentrations for man-made substances and near background levels for natural occurring substances. A number of these policy targets are set for 2020-2021 and the question on whether we are on track to achieve these joint policy visions for a marine environment regarding low concentrations of contaminants remain as important as ever. This draft report represents a first attempt to map contamination ‘problem areas’ and ‘non-problem areas’ at European scale, while at the same time exploring whether Europe has broken some of the worrying trends for historical, known hazardous substances.
- The draft report aims to:
- provide a baseline for potential ‘non-problem’ and ‘problem’ areas for contaminants across the 10 regional European seas,
- present temporal trends in the concentrations of selected contaminants, and
- provide an indicator-based methodology for assessing contaminants across Europe’s seas and, in the process, illustrating data coverage and gaps.
- The draft report has strived to use existing European terminology, methodology, official reported data as well as published threshold values primarily made available through the work of the Regional Sea Conventions. In some instances, information has been provided directly by EEA member countries. Data and information sources includes a.o.:
- ICES’ DOME Data portal, primarily HELCOM & OSPAR data,
- Data delivered through the EIONET Central Data Repository,
- Direct data delivery from France and Portugal,
- EMODnet Chemistry (Baltic Sea and Black Sea)
- EMBLAS project (to be further updated)
- Only approved and published threshold values (all taken from EU Directives, OSPAR, HELCOM and ICES).
- Assessment grid 20-100 km INSPIRE compliant
We would also like to thank the EEA member countries for their input and comments over the last year, which have been considered as much as possible in producing the current draft report.