Environmental Risk Research – Science for achieving health of the environment

Achieving the sound health of the environment is a global task for humanity. The mission of the Center for Health and Environmental Risk Research at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan is to research state-of-the-art science to support this goal of sound health of the environment worldwide.
The Center’s key areas of study include environmental toxicology for biota, fate, and transport of contaminants in the environment and trace and comprehensive chemical analysis for monitoring among several other areas.
The environmental toxicology laboratory is working to upgrade new ecotoxicity testing methods using various organisms for diverse chemicals and to connect the molecular, cellular to individuals and populations of aquatic, benthic, and terrestrial organisms. The series of flow-through systems for long-term fish test for assessing the reproduction/endocrine-disrupting effects of chemicals is one of the key study areas of the laboratory.
Research on the dynamics of contaminants focuses on the simulation of how contaminants migrate and distribute in the environment. GIS-based multimedia fate models simulate the fate and transport of contaminants in rivers and catchment networks including chemical dynamics among air, water, sea, and land with high geographical resolution.
Comprehensive and trace chemical analysis also has key importance to measure a large number of chemicals we now need to manage in the environment. Sophisticated analytical techniques and information technology are both necessary to manipulate the big-data of the analyte chemicals.