AMAP assessment 2015: human health in the Arctic

T he 2015 Human Health Assessment Report has continued the historical line from the former reports (1Á3), including new knowledge, missing links and information from each report, drawing attention to the most recent knowledge and perspectives for future research. The separate chapters in this special issue reveal details on monitoring, known health effects, relations to climate change and, not least, the difficult communication challenges to reach policymakers, public health authorities and the people of the Arctic. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), Phase 1, started in 1991 to implement components of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) as adopted at that time by Ministers of the eight Arctic countries. The main task was to prepare an assessment of the state of the Arctic environment with respect to defined pollution issues. On the basis of this, AMAP designed and implemented a monitoring programme , and conducted its first assessment. The monitoring programme was largely based on adaptation of ongoing national and international activities, initiating new monitoring and research work only where necessary. The first AMAP assessment was presented in 1998, entitled ''Arctic Pollution Issues: A State of the Arctic Environment Report'' (1). The first AMAP assessment was a compilation of current knowledge about the Arctic region and a statement of the prevailing conditions in the area. The report had a broad and holistic perspective, with human health as a separate chapter. The report would have been impossible without the generous offer from Health Canada to analyse blood samples from all eight Arctic countries, providing the very first quality assured comparison of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and metals in human biological materials at the circumpolar level. This basic biomonitoring programme was thoroughly discussed by Odland and Nieboer (4). Even though programmes implemented in scarcely populated areas provide special challenges, different programmes have been introduced in several regions and countries. It was concluded in the health chapter of the 1998 report that several groups of people in the Arctic are highly exposed to environmental contaminants. It was also concluded that variation in human exposure depends on a combination of (a) varying environmental concentrations of contaminants, (b) local physical and biological pathways which make the contaminants available and (c) the local dietary habits of the people. The overall report concluded that the current understanding of transport processes and the ability to quantify them was inadequate. In particular, the determination of transport processes and …