By Loretta B Manele
It is only through post spill monitoring that the risks of impacts on the human food chain, marine ecosystems and commercial marine resources are fully evaluated.
The statement was made by Freya Goodsir, a research scientist from CEFAS (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science) when she spoke on “Fundamentals of Post Spill Monitoring” at the Strengthening Marine Pollution Incident Resilience in the Pacific Islands” workshop that was held last month at the Heritage Park Hotel.
Goodsir stressed that for successful and effective monitoring, you will need to include things like being able to understand when to monitor, how frequently do we need to monitor, and also having an understanding of knowing when to stop monitoring.
She said in the context of when to monitor, this should be when an activity is expected to have the potential for environmental or human health impacts.
“You should consider things like the type of pollutant, so this might be oil, chemical, other pollutants.
You should be thinking about its physical chemical properties such as density, solubility, volatility. Its inherent toxicity, so things like diesels, marine diesels are more toxic in short term than oils, things like that”
Goodsir mentioned that you should also have an understanding of the movement and thickness of the oil in relation to the resource and its quantity.
“During the first incidents you might not know what the actual extent of the oil or pollution that’s been spilled.
So having an understanding will help focus those aims in those efforts and also having an understanding of the location and resources at risk”
In terms of how frequently post spill monitoring should be carried out, Goodsir said several drivers affect how frequently we monitor and this is frequently enough to track changes.
Goodsir pointed out that typical levels of contamination will rise rapidly and will then decline over longer periods of time and bioaccumulated contaminants will follow a similar profile to that.
She said this means that the frequency of monitoring will be stepped up quite intensely to start with and then will be scaled back to prioritise efforts to become more cost effective and less resource heavy.
“There’s a balance to be struck there in terms of the frequency of the monitoring, but also the level of funding which we want to undertake it”
Regarding when monitoring should stop, she said monitoring programmes are not generally open ended however in some cases, long term impacts and further rates of recovery may be studied.
Goodsir explained that designing a monitoring programme survey requires considerable planning and decisions need to be made in terms of the value of the study as well as understanding the ability to provide useful conclusions.
She also stated that a typical monitoring programme survey will include things like the selected biological features and key indicators, chosen to their ecological significance, but also their sensitivity.
“Things like essential environmental parameters, such as thinking about the chemical physical characteristics, but also baseline data, and then understanding the characteristics of the pollutant as well, so identifying sources to assess specific impacts on those”
Goodsir said monitoring efforts can also be complex and include factors like weather, climate, currents and all sorts of things in the particular environment aspect that will challenge your efforts.
She added that there are also risks and hazard and with some of these incidents there could be fires around and human health impacts to consider in terms of being able to go out there and being exposed to such risks.
Another factor also highlighted by Goodsir is “accessibility” in the case of thinking how you will be able to access the areas that might have oil spills and how difficult that might be.
