What is environmental monitoring?

What is environmental monitoring, its types

There is a growing sense of environmental awareness and concern on the planet. Along with this has come a new form of assessment - environmental monitoring. This is a bit of a buzzword in the environmental field. It is used to describe the various processes, tests, and studies that are carried out to assess the state of nature, its natural changes, and the impact of any anthropogenic (human) activity. Below is what exactly environmental monitoring includes and where it is applied.

What is the purpose of environmental monitoring?

At its core, environmental monitoring is intended to help understand the natural environment and protect it from any negative effects of human activity. The process is an integral part of environmental impact assessment.

The goals of environmental monitoring are:

  • Establishing baseline quality;
  • Identifying environmental trends and any changes;
  • Determining the success of projects;
  • Confirming whether environmental objectives have been met.

Over the past decade, few countries in Europe and Central Asia have been able to maintain existing monitoring activities. In many cities in the subregion, monitoring of urban air pollution, an important risk to human health, is ineffective. Monitoring of solid and hazardous waste is weak, and industrial emissions are also not adequately monitored, reducing the effectiveness of policy instruments such as emission fees and fines.

Monitoring of transboundary air pollution also needs strengthening. Moreover, many countries in Europe and Central Asia lack uniform national methodologies in different assessment areas and their classification systems are often incompatible with international standards. Therefore, the main task is to bring state environmental monitoring in all countries to common standards.

Types of environmental monitoring

In general, environmental monitoring specialists focus on four main areas - air, soil, water, and biodiversity.

Air quality monitoring

Air quality monitoring

Air pollution is a growing problem in both developed and undeveloped countries around the world. The expected threats are so great that the EU has even introduced air pollution standards, obliging all of its member states to comply with them.

Contaminated air not only affects the health of the planet but also has detrimental effects on the well-being of the population. Since the concentration of air pollution is strongly influenced by the wind, anemometer data is almost always taken into account when monitoring ambient air quality.

Natural landscape features such as valleys and mountain ranges are also taken into account. These can interfere with the process of lateral atmospheric mixing. Combined with atmospheric inversion mixing, this can lead to abnormally high levels of air pollution.

Soil Quality Monitoring

Soil Quality Monitoring

Agriculture is an integral part of global food production, while forest and jungle restoration plays a key role in keeping the air clean and CO2-free.

Thus, a large number of environmental monitoring projects focus on studying and tracking soil quality. This includes looking at factors such as erosion, soil contamination, and salt levels.

Water quality monitoring

Water quality monitoring

Collecting and analyzing water quality information is an important part of ensuring the safety and hygiene of lakes, rivers, oceans, estuaries and other bodies of water. Chemical condition is key, so experts look for the presence of oxygen, nutrients, oils, pesticides, and metals.

Physical conditions such as currents, temperature, sediment and erosion are taken into account. In addition, biological measurements of plant and animal life are used to determine quality.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity

Sustainable development depends on a healthy environment, which in turn depends on the biodiversity of ecosystems. Protected areas and the promotion of their sustainable development are important for its preservation.

The Biodiversity Indicator provides a means to measure responses to ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss in a country. It shows the extent to which areas important for biodiversity, cultural heritage, scientific research, recreation, conservation of natural resources, and other environmental values are protected from incompatible uses.

Waste Monitoring

Waste Monitoring

The first of these is waste monitoring. Waste represents a significant loss of resources in the form of materials and energy. Waste treatment and disposal can cause environmental pollution and expose people to harmful substances and infectious organisms.

Waste generation is closely related to the level of economic activity in a country and reflects the production and consumption patterns of society. Thus, the reduction of waste generation is an indicator of the economy's transition to less material-intensive production and consumption patterns.

The main purpose of the waste indicator is to measure the pressure on the environment of the total amount of waste generated and waste by category. Waste intensity is a driving force indicator and shows the response to anthropogenic activity.

Remote sensing

Remote sensing

Remote sensing can play an important role in monitoring and reporting on environmental problems, particularly when the purpose of such observations is to assess the impact of pollutants on a large scale over long periods of time, i.e. on a regional, continental or even global scale over long periods of time.

Remote sensing can provide additional information to existing ground-based environmental monitoring systems. It can be used to meet the need for timely information. Information from planetary observation can be used in geographic information systems to overlay and compare with other geo-referenced information.

Enterprise monitoring

Enterprise monitoring

Environmental monitoring and reporting of an enterprise is a system of measures implemented and paid for by operators, individuals, or legal entities exercising real power over the technical functioning of the facility. Such a system includes:

  1. Continuous and periodic observation, recording, storage, and processing of data relating to environmental protection;
  2. Presentation of the results to the management and all employees of the enterprises, state authorities, and the general public in the form of primary, calculated, or aggregated data, as well as in the form of general information.

Strengthening environmental monitoring and enterprise reporting will improve the monitoring of environmental compliance of enterprises. Increasing the amount of environmental information produced by enterprises, improving its quality, and making it more accessible to the general public will help put significant pressure on polluters to reduce their negative impact on the environment.

Environmental monitoring is an opportunity to proactively consider and prevent threats that could cause various, including global, disasters on the planet.

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Pub: 05 Dec 2022 19:50 UTC
Edit: 05 Dec 2022 19:55 UTC
Views: 6065