Oral Presentation Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Australasia 2023

Moving towards multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary solutions to chemicals management (#113)

Michelle C Bloor 1
  1. University of Glasgow, Dumfries, SCOTLAND, United Kingdom

Historically, within SETAC, we have tended to view chemicals from our ‘science silo’ without considering the wider perspective. More recently, SETAC Europe members have aligned with UNEP in calling for multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to address the challenges of chemicals management. The first step towards facilitating and achieving truly effective collaborations between different disciplines is effective communication. However, this is not straightforward to achieve when each discipline has its own vocabulary, culture and practices. Another layer to this complex landscape is engaging with stakeholders and members of the local community, which might include citizen science initiatives, which can help to bring a sense of ownership to projects and has been shown to deliver greater success. We must also consider whether all data is useful data, and what level of information is sufficient to make informed decisions. Another challenge is communicating the outputs of our research to policy-makers in such a way that the resulting legislation is scientifically robust.  Through this interactive presentation, we will explore some of the key challenges confronting SETAC members and how we can collectively overcome them.