Climate Change and the European Water Dimension - Agri ...

They also note that: ‘Temperature is not the only parameter of climate variation that
would affect the transport processes of compounds. For instance, changes in other
climate parameters, e.g. wind intensity, ice cover over the Great Lakes, and quantity,
quality, and spatial variation of rain and snow, associated with various climate
patterns would also affect scavenging and deposition of organic pollutants’.
The study by Ma et al. (2004) is important, because it is the first of its kind and clearly
provides evidence for the potential scope and scale of underlying climate fluctuations
to impact the distribution and cycling of atmospheric POPs.
VI.F.4. A brief case study of the Arctic – an illustration of potential
complexities and inter-linking
Macdonald and co-workers (2003) present an excellent synthesis of the potential
influences of global change on contaminant pathways to, within and from the Arctic.
They state: During the 1990s, a quiet revolution took place in the perception of the
Arctic. Despite early evidence of cyclical change in northern biological populations
and ice conditions, the general view among many western physical scientists
throughout the 1960s to 1980s was that the Arctic was a relatively stable place. This
view has been replaced by one of an Artic where major shifts can occur in a very
short time, forced primarily by natural variation in the atmospheric pressure field
associated with the ‘Arctic Oscillation (AO)’.
They go on to give examples, and to speculate, about the ways in which such largescale
atmospheric processes can potentially influence:
• Inputs of POPs/pesticides from the source regions of North America, Europe
and Asia;
• Gas exchange, influenced by deposition and ice cover, in the North Pacific
and Bering Sea, and in the Arctic Ocean (Jantunen and Bidleman, 1995);
• Inputs to the Arctic waters from Russian and Canadian riverine inputs;
• Releases from glacial ice mass loss and snow melt;
• Cycling of POPs within Arctic lake waters;
• The chemical partitioning and degradation of POPs in the Artic;
These physical and chemical changes may ultimately, in turn, be linked to key
biological aspects, such as:
• Altering food web structure;
• Food deprivation or shifts in diet;
• Altered migration pathways and invading species, and even – it is argued –
• The link between organochlorine compounds, disease and epidemics in
wildlife populations (Macdonald et al., 2003).
214