Articles

Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security - A national security assessment

Les êtres humains et les écosystèmes sont exposés chaque jour à de nombreuses substances chimiques, dont les effets peuvent se combiner pour produire ce que l’on appelle un effet cocktail. Pourtant, la réglementation européenne continue d’évaluer ces substances individuellement, sans prendre en compte leurs effets combinés. Pour combler cette lacune, un facteur d’évaluation des mélanges appelé Mixture Assessment Factor (MAF) pourrait être introduit dans le règlement européen REACH (qui vise l’Enregistrement, Évaluation, Autorisation et la Restriction des substances Chimiques). Ce nouvel outil permettrait de mieux tenir compte de l’exposition simultanée à plusieurs substances.

Heat and cold are now established health risk factors, with several studies reporting important mortality effects in populations around the world.1, 2, 3 The associated health burden is expected to increase with climate change, especially under the most extreme scenarios of global warming.4, 5 However, robust estimates of excess mortality in the current and future periods are still challenging to obtain due to the numerous factors influencing vulnerability to heat and cold, including climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic conditions.6 These factors represent the main drivers of variation in mortality risks, which have been shown to differ geographically and across age groups.

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Agricultural pesticide use and its associated environmental harms is widespread throughout much of the world. Efforts to mitigate this harm have largely been focused on reducing pesticide contamination of the water and air, as runoff and pesticide drift are the most significant sources of offsite pesticide movement. Yet pesticide contamination of the soil can also result in environmental harm.