Auto Draft

by | Apr 14, 2025 | Uncategorized

Confronting the interconnection of chemical pollution and climate change

Simona A. Bălan a, Saskia K. van Bergen b, Ann Blake c, Topher Buck d, Scott Coffin e, Jamie C. DeWitt f, Gretta Goldenman g, Frank A. von Hippel h, Sophia von Hippel i, Christopher P. Leonetti j, David Rist a, Martin Scheringer k, Xenia Trier

Highlights

  • Climate change and chemical pollution are interdependent planetary threats.
  • Climate change mitigation could increase chemical pollution and associated harm.
  • Chemical pollution must be addressed in climate mitigation efforts.
  • Transitioning from fossil fuels requires reducing production and consumption of chemicals.

Abstract

Climate change and chemical pollution are interdependent planetary threats, but climate change mitigation efforts typically do not consider chemicals and materials. This may exacerbate chemical pollution and associated harm to human and environmental health. Because most chemicals and materials are currently derived from petrochemicals, the extraction of fossil fuels cannot be limited without transitioning chemical manufacturing to different carbon sources. However, simply changing the carbon source is insufficient and could exacerbate the biodiversity crisis. We propose a comprehensive strategy to address the interconnections between chemical pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. This includes incentives for key actors to reduce the global production and consumption of chemicals and materials, to transition to chemicals and products that are safe and sustainable by design, to develop metrics and targets to assess progress, and to continuously evaluate and modify strategies based on performance metrics.

Introduction

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all United Nations Member States aims to “protect the planet from degradation (…) so that it can support the needs of the present and future generations” (United Nations, 2015). Despite this agenda, environmental impacts of societies are exceeding the “safe operating space” defined by Rockström et al. (2009) resulting in climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, plastics waste, food insecurity, and other global crises that threaten entire societies and ecosystems. In addition, the burden of these crises typically disproportionately falls on those who are most vulnerable and who have contributed least to their causes (Boyd and Orellana, 2022; Woodruff et al., 2023).1
Rockström et al. (2009) also warned that “Planetary boundaries are interdependent, because transgressing one may both shift the position of other boundaries or cause them to be transgressed.” This environmental interconnectivity has also been described as a complex system, where risks can propagate from one system to another (Hope, 2006; Renn et al., 2022). For example, replacing fossil fuels with biobased resources, both for energy and chemicals, will put pressure on land and shift impacts from climate change to biodiversity loss. Similarly, Persson et al. (2022) highlighted connections between plastics and climate change and biosphere integrity.
A holistic approach to addressing environmental issues has been called for in several policy documents, including the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) (European Commission, 2020b) and the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management(SAICM), now the Global Framework on Chemicals (GFC) (Friege et al., 2024). This was also addressed by the United Nations in 2021, by acknowledging that chemical pollution is a global environmental crisis that must be tackled with the climate emergency and decline in biodiversity (Boyd and Orellana, 2022; United Nations Environment Programme, 2021). Unfortunately, perhaps because of the complexity of the problem and lack of data, the impact of chemicals on planetary health is rarely considered holistically. The complexity covers aspects such as the diversity of chemicals, their varied uses in materials and products, their potential transformation to other chemicals, their environmental transport and fate, the multiple exposure routes that may exist, and the different toxicities that a substance may have alone or in combination with other chemicals (mixture toxicity) or with other stressors (Posthuma et al., 2019).
Despite the limited research and awareness, chemicals, including plastics, affect all aspects of the environment, including climate change. Since impacts are caused by the sum of chemicals affecting a biological or earth system, this also implies that chemical production and consumption must be considered in their totality and across the chemical life cycles. As a consequence, it is necessary to assess both historic, accumulated pollution, as well as current emissions in order to assess the absolute impacts of chemical uses and the size of the safe operating space for future activities (Kosnik et al., 2022). Rockström et al. (2023) warned that, while their impacts could not be quantified due to a lack of data, novel entities and other pollutants “raise clear intragenerational and intergenerational justice concerns.” Therefore, policies that only address one environmental issue in isolation may shift the burden to other environmental issues, and thereby fail to protect healthy living conditions for humans and wildlife.
Tackling decarbonization and, more broadly, environmental degradation requires addressing the core drivers. In particular, efforts to decarbonize the energy economy or move toward a post-extractivist model will fall short without recognizing that most of the chemicals and materials used in the global economy are currently derived from fossil fuels. This in turn calls for a broader policy mix, aimed at enabling innovation, experimentation, diffusion and networking, as well as facilitating structural economic change (European Environment Agency, 2019a). To achieve sustainability transitions, radical innovations need to move beyond experimentation and diffuse more widely (European Environment Agency, 2019a). As Tickner et al. (2022) phrased it, “Achieving an industry transition of the magnitude required necessitates an urgent “wartime effort” akin to the postwar effort that launched the petrochemical industry’s rapid growth during the 1940s.”
In this paper we highlight the connection between impacts of chemicals and climate change, and why climate change mitigation efforts that fail to address their externalities may increase chemical pollution and biodiversity loss. We thus propose a comprehensive strategy for producing, using, and managing chemicals and materials in close connection with climate mitigation efforts to remain within planetary boundaries.

Section snippets

Chemical pollution is a planetary threat

Chemical pollution is one of the nine planetary threats (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen, Richardson, et al., 2015), but few attempts have been made to define characteristics of chemicals that constitute planetary boundary threats (Diamond et al., 2015; MacLeod et al., 2014). An international goal to minimize adverse impacts of chemicals and wastes by 2020 was not met (United Nations Environment Programme, 2019). Meanwhile, global use of chemicals is rising and is predicted to continue to do

Ways forward

To minimize the tradeoffs of current mainstream climate change mitigation strategies and chemical pollution, we propose a comprehensive strategy aimed at transforming how chemicals and materials are produced, used, and managed.

Conclusions

Humanity has several big challenges to tackle, including how to achieve equitable well-being without exceeding the planetary boundaries that are the foundation for sustained human life on earth. An alternative to the current linear “take-make-waste” model is critical to addressing the systemic risks from the multiple interrelated planetary health crises the world is experiencing. This involves producing and using fewer chemicals and materials, and ensuring that those used are safe and

Author statement

SB wrote a first draft after discussion with all co-authors. All co-authors extensively discussed the reviewers’ comments and contributed to the revisions, including actual edits of the text. This multi-author work required extensive rounds of discussions and refinement.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Simona A. Bălan: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Saskia K. van Bergen:Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization. Ann Blake:Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Topher Buck: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization. Scott Coffin: Writing – review & editing, Writing –

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank K. Grant, L. Mortenson, D. Cohen, A. Cardenas, R. Amundson, G. Jensen, and A. Stauffer for their helpful feedback on the manuscript.

References (86)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.