Ecotoxicology Challenges During Climate Change Scenarios

Exposure to multiple stressors, like contaminant mixtures and other abiotic stressors, can have additive, antagonistic, or synergistic outcomes in aquatic organisms and populations. Research on the ways in which global climate change affects an organism’s response to pollution is in the early stages of investigation. However, the research that has been done suggests global climate change will influence the fate, distribution, and toxicity of contaminants. This may have long-term consequences for the aquatic environment. Current regulatory and monitoring work is primarily conducted with pre-established guidelines from the EPA or other governing bodies. Due to this, most aquatic risk assessment and regulation do not consider how climate change will alter an organisms response to pollution or how ecosystem services may be disrupted due to climate change. This is an issue of growing concern and the influence of altered abiotic factors on ecotoxicity will be discussed here in detail. Limited research on these issues makes the field of ecotoxicology in a changing climate challenging to study. This chapter will explore how changes in toxicity, toxicokinetic, and environmental fate of contaminants may be altered under global climate change. Research gaps in ecotoxicology in relation to climate change scenarios will be a major theme of this chapter.