Persistent Organic Pollutants and Heavy Metals (Including Mercury) - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 182

can still travel long distances and accumulate in biota. In these circumstances, the monit-
oring data gathered and interpreted by AMAP were extremely useful because they showed
that the predictive criteria were meaningless for these substances. Instead, the teams who
evaluate proposals to add new substances to the agreements were able to use the monitor-
ing data surrogates to justify taking action on these substances.
Asyouwillhavenoticedfrom Table8.2 , membersofthePFASfamilyarenowbanned
under the CLRTAP POPs protocol and the Stockholm Convention agreements. Action on
PFAS would not have been possible without negotiating fundamental amendments to the
agreements if the flexibility to use surrogates had not been built into the agreements. The
close linkages between the scientific evidence presented through AMAP with the political
influence of the Arctic Council and of representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples played
a very important role in the global curbing of the use of these substances.
A good deal more is now understood about the toxicity of POPs than was known back
in 1994 when we compiled the CLRTAP state of knowledge report. However, as Robert
Letcher and the AMAP 2009 assessment team point out, there remains a dearth of inform-
ation on cause-effect relationships concerning POPs and Arctic biota and wildlife. We con-
tinue to rely heavily on extrapolations from controlled experiments with laboratory anim-
als, on comparing body burdens in Arctic animals (mainly top predators) to effects levels
established from laboratory animals and on inferring effects from various biomarkers that
indicate change in immune, endocrine, reproductive and developmental systems.
The briefest of overviews of POPs toxicity would occupy the rest of this topic, and
even after that, I am not sure we would be much further ahead. Therefore, we will largely
rely on Table 8.3 to summarize knowledge on a selected number of POPs, including the
legacy organochlorines, brominated flame retardants and the PFAS family.
Table 8.3 - A simplified overview of the toxic properties of some POPs