Leen Hordijk, Director of JRC-IES, and Jaroslav Slobodnik, President of NORMAN, signing the collaboration agreement on 10 June 2010
Researching the threat of emerging pollutants
On 10 June, a collaboration agreement between the JRC and the NORMAN association (Network of Reference Laboratories for Monitoring of Emerging Environmental Pollutants) was signed in Stresa, Italy to improve coordination of research on "emerging pollutants". The signing took place at the joint JRC-NORMAN workshop on river-basin specific pollutants in the context of the European Water Framework Directive.
The main scope of this important collaboration is to enhance the impact and effectiveness of national efforts in generating information about the environmental occurrence and effects of new or so-called emerging pollutants. This is pivotal in deepening the understanding of the scientific, economic and social issues related to new and less-investigated chemicals entering our natural resources.
With this agreement, the JRC enforces its leading position of introducing new options for policies invoking environmental monitoring; the domain of its novel research team, MAPLE (Monitoring Across Policies and Environmental Media) at the JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability.
NORMAN is a network of reference laboratories, research centres and related organisations for the monitoring of the emergence of environmentally relevant substances. It is a non-profit organisation representing over 45 European key institutes dealing with environmental monitoring.
14/06/10