化学品足迹:概念、研究进展及挑战

化学品污染被联合国环境规划署列为影响人类生存与发展的全球重大环境问题之一。为实现可持续的化学品管理,需定量评价产品生命周期内由化学品排放造成的生态影响。然而,当前的化学品风险评价指标体系往往指向零碎的危害性或毒性终点,未能综合出整体性指标来定量表征生态系统所承受的损害,亦不能衡量人类活动排放的化学品总量与环境承载容量的相对大小。作为环境足迹一员,化学品足迹继承了"足迹"指标的特点,可定量表征生态系统受化学品影响的程度,并结合生态阈值及环境承载容量,有助于评价人类活动对环境可持续性的影响,有望成为公众、企业、决策者及利益相关者之间相互交流的重要工具。本文概述了化学品足迹的基本概念及其发展历程,介绍了现有的化学品足迹计算方法及其应用于不同空间尺度下的案例研究,讨论了化学品足迹研究中存在的问题与挑战,并对其应用前景进行了展望。

Chemical Footprint: Concepts, Research Progress and Challenges

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), chemical pollution is one of the serious global environmental problems threatening the survival and development of human beings. To achieve sustainable chemical management, it is necessary to quantitatively assess the potential ecological impacts caused by emission of chemicals during the entire lifecycle of products. However, the current risk assessment indicators on chemicals generally rely on scattered hazards or endpoints, failing to give a holistic indicator that can systemically measure the actual damage to ecosystems, and cannot be employed to compare human pressure on ecosystems against environmental carrying capacity. As a member of environmental footprint indices, chemical footprint has inherited the features of footprint-style indicators that are capable of quantitatively characterizing the extent of the impacts on ecosystems by chemicals. Moreover, chemical footprint can contribute to sustainability assessment based on a combination of ecological threshold and environmental carrying capacity, thus can be used as a useful communication tool among the public, enterprises, decision makers and stakeholders. In this review, the fundamental concepts and development of chemical footprint are summarized. In addition, the existing calculation methods for chemical footprint with case studies at varied regional scales are introduced. Several scientific issues and challenges on chemical footprint studies are discussed. Some perspectives are presented on the application of chemical footprint.