Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the acid rain provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. EPA continues
to work with other federal and state agencies to improve understanding of the
nature and consequences of air pollutant deposition to terrestrial and aquatic
ecosystems on regional scales. More recently, EPA has conducted and supported
research linking global climate projections to regional-scale air quality (EPA
2009), which has demonstrated the potential for global climate change to exac-
erbate the challenge of meeting health-based air quality standards. Regional
long-term approaches for assessment and problem-solving have also been im-
plemented in the water quality arena, including for the Chesapeake Bay, the
Florida Everglades, and the Great Lakes Basin (Table 2-2). In the future, EPA
will need to develop a better understanding of the sources, transport, and fate of
global-scale pollutants to avoid the possibility that little improvement in envi-
ronmental quality occurs even when local investment is large. For example, al-
though lead from local sources, such as coal-fired power plants, is important,
these local emissions are superimposed on a global background of lead, some of
which is transported on intercontinental scales from both natural and anthropo-
genic sources (UNEP 2006). Mercury transport at the regional and global scale
is another example. It is not feasible for EPA to undertake all the global-scale
monitoring and modeling that are needed, but it can work proactively with other
US federal agencies (such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Sci-
ence Foundation) and with international organizations to ensure that the issues
that it most needs to understand remain high on research agendas. (See Chapter
4 for a discussion on collaboration.) Current environmental challenges are ex-
panding not only in space but also in time. Some responses to perturbations are
rapid (such as algal blooms), others are slow (such as vegetation response to
climate change). To understand how and why these effects unfold, long-term
data are needed to characterize the changes, the causes, and the potential impli-
cations of different policy options. (The needs for such data are discussed fur-
ther in Chapters 3 and 4.) Without the perspective provided by long-term data, it
is easy to assume wrongly that short-term variations in environmental character-
istics reflect substantive changes in the environment, and it is easy to miss im-
portant but subtle or slow changes in the environment.
SUMMARY
This chapter discusses some of the major factors driving changes in the
environment and gives illustrative examples of the complex and multi-
disciplinary challenges that EPA faces now and will probably face in the future.
To address those challenges, EPA will need to continue to develop and support
scientific methods, tools, and technologies that apply a systems-thinking ap-
proach to understand environmental changes and their effects on human health
(see Chapter 4).
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