A Secretariat Article 13 report would identify how airborne toxics travel throughout North America

The Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has launched an initiative to report on air pollution in North America. This report will look at how pollution travels across borders and how that pollution affects the North American environment.

In recent years, scientists have learned that certain types of air pollutants - including the large group of organochlorine chemicals and heavy metals such as mercury - can travel long distances through the atmosphere before settling in a completely different area or even country. This phenomenon is known as the long-range transport of air pollutants.

Cases of this phenomenon abound. Take the Great Lakes region, for example. There, since the 1970s, scientists have been tracking concentrations of the insecticide DDT and other toxic chemicals such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in the lakes and particularly in the fish, birds and mammals that depend on their waters. Concentration levels remain high, even though those chemicals are no longer being produced or used locally. Many of the pollutants have been carried to the Great Lakes Basin by air currents from nacec.areas as far away as the southern United States and beyond.

Regional cooperation will help address airborne toxics in the Great Lakes region, the Arctic and other key ecosystems in North America.

The international response to the air-pollutant transport phenomenon is growing rapidly. Examples include efforts by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the UN Economic Commission for Europe under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution.

Building on existing international work, the CEC's Secretariat plans to prepare an Article 13 report to the Council that will assist the United States, Canada and Mexico in developing regional strategies to control airborne pollutants.

"Regional initiatives of this sort have an essential role to play in advancing international efforts to address the long-range transport of air pollutants as well as helping to address North American pollution problems," said CEC Executive Director Victor Lichtinger. He added that the report will draw on the expertise and knowledge of scientists, specialized institutions and government agencies in the three countries to help set the stage for collaborative regional strategies and actions to address the problem in North America.

"Up to now, there has been no such comprehensive approach in our region," Lichtinger said. He said the report will be an important part of efforts to reduce the impact of airborne pollutants on the health of North American citizens and their environment.

Specifically the report would use existing data to examine the origins, transport and destination of these airborne pollutants. It will examine the accumulation of selected airborne pollutants in specific ecosystems in North America.

Among toxics to be considered are the four substances already being examined by the CEC: mercury, PCBs and the pesticides DDT and chlordane. In addition to the three persistent organic pollutants (POPs) selected - PCBs, DDT and chlordane - the report would also consider the nine other POPs identified under a 1995 decision by UNEP's Governing Council, among other toxics.

A second element of the report would identify existing government initiatives concerning airborne pollutants as a basis for developing North American strategies. For example, as part of the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, signed by both Canada and the United States, countries are negotiating new protocols to address POPs and heavy metals, in addition to the existing protocols dealing with acid rain.

The CEC already has several projects that would benefit from, and assist in, the preparation of a report on the long-range transport of air pollutants in North America. These include the Sound Management of Chemicals and the North American Pollutants Release Inventory - which are both part of the CEC's 1996 annual program.

Under Article 13 of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, the CEC's Secretariat can prepare special reports to the Council on environmental matters that fall within the scope of the cooperation agreement.