Planet Earth is facing a triple environmental crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. These three crises are closely interconnected.

To address the pollution crisis, the European Green Deal sets a zero pollution ambition, which involves ‘creating a toxic-free environment’. This ambition is addressed through the European Union’s Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability and the EU Action Plan: “Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil”, which together aim to minimise the risk of chemicals to biodiversity and human health.

However, it has been argued that anthropogenic chemicals (with other novel entities) have passed the safe operating space of the planetary boundary, since annual production and releases outstrip global capacity for risk assessment and environmental monitoring.

In Europe, the number of chemicals in use far exceeds capacities of conventional risk assessment and monitoring, chemical registration data is often inadequate and risk assessment does not sufficiently consider damages to biodiversity and ecosystem services, in particular in the terrestrial compartment.

Many tens of thousands of different man-made chemicals enter the environment, in ever-increasing amounts, and such chemicals are now ubiquitous. This includes:

• legacy contaminants – persistent organic pollutants that have been banned or restricted in recent decades but continue to turn up in wildlife due to their slow rate of degradation) and
• emerging contaminants – synthetic chemicals not commonly monitored in the environment, including ‘contaminants of emerging concern’ (chemicals that have been detected in the environment or humans and that may cause ecological or human health impacts and typically not restricted under current legislation).

Many of these substances are classified as harmful to the environment (and to human health), with effects on biodiversity at the level of genes, species and ecosystems. The costs of resulting damage to biodiversity, and the consequent decline in ecosystem services, are likely to be very substantial.

Yet for now, we have limited understanding of how such chemicals move through wildlife food chains and the extent of damage to biodiversity, in particular in terrestrial environments.