Integrated risk assessment: from exposure through AOPs to ecosystem services

Chemical pollution exerts significant and far-reaching effects on biodiversity and the health of ecosystems. Over time, global product and technology consumption has increased the presence of human-made chemicals in the natural environment. Many of these chemicals persist in the environment and become pervasive over time, negatively affecting aquatic ecosystems globally. Aquatic ecosystems provide essential ecosystem services that benefit human society, such as the provision of food. Thus, to understand the link between chemical emissions from product and technology life cycles and their damage on ecosystem health, it is crucial to characterize damage on aquatic ecosystems associated with chemical emissions in life cycle assessment (relevant for product life cycle performance) and ecological risk assessment (relevant for water and ecosystem protection). This is pivotal in facilitating a worldwide shift towards a more sustainable application of chemicals across products and technologies and safeguarding the diversity of aquatic life. The work presented in this PhD thesis addresses the link of the life cycle of chemical emissions to damage on aquatic ecosystem health by focusing on four research objectives: (i) to develop a consistent framework to link ecotoxicological effects on aquatic organisms to damage on species diversity, functional diversity, and ecosystem services that are fully in line with the boundary conditions of LCIA, (ii) to develop a systematic ecotoxicity test data curation approach to derive a transparent and high-quality dataset of effect test data for more than 10,000 chemicals, (iii) to improve ecotoxicity effects modeling by considering differences in sensitivity of species from different taxonomic groups toward chemical exposure, and (iv) to quantitatively characterize the relationship between mixture-toxicity pressure from chemicals and observed differences in aquatic intra- and inter-species occurrence. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 summarizes possible methods to translate ...