Risk assessments of contaminants of environmental concern need to address future scenarios to effectively protect human health and ecosystems

This article intends to discuss some limitations of the current approaches used to assess human health and environmental risks caused by contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). Human health and environmental risk assessments of CECs are normally based on a relationship between measured and predicted environmental concentrations (MECs and PECs, respectively) often estimated based on past conditions, and the respective predicted no-effect concentrations (PNECs). However, for most of chemicals, emissions continue to increase following the population growth and increasing polluting activities, resulting in a continuous rise of contaminants concentrations in the environmental compartments and the consequent increase of risks associated with them. Therefore, risk predictions based on past data may be unreliable and ineffective to support actions aimed to protect the environment, particularly in developing countries where pollutants monitoring are lacking or regulations are based on few academic studies. In this context, new tools need to be incorporated to improve the risk assessment protocols. Projections of future scenarios may predict the environmental concentrations of chemicals, allowing decision makers to establish appropriate actions to control the emissions and avoid the emergence of risks to human health and ecosystems before critical conditions are achieved. Thus, effective policies to control pollution and its effects would be taken.