Global Estuaries Monitoring Programme

The Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM) Programme is co-designed by partners and stakeholders with a view to developing a global network to monitor environmental contaminants (e.g. pharmaceutical residues, emerging pollutants of concern, micro-plastics, pathogens etc.) in major urbanised estuaries worldwide.

The Programme will develop standard sampling and analysis methods with training opportunities to build capacity for global estuaries monitoring. With about 100 countries expected to join the Programme, its results will reveal the pollution situation around the globe, identify the estuaries that require attention and improvement, recommend priority contaminants for control, and promote best practices to combat the pollution problems and thereby creating cleaner estuaries. At present, over 100,000 chemical substances are being used in our daily life and in industries.  Among which, 4,000 pharmaceuticals are currently in use to prevent and treat human and animal diseases.  Many of these chemicals will eventually be released into the estuaries through pathways such as rivers, surface runoff and partially treated effluents discharged from wastewater treatment plants. Globally, there is a lack of information available for the occurrence and environmental risks of various chemical contaminants in urbanised estuaries, especially those in Africa and South America, and in some coastal areas in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Hence, the GEM Programme will develop standardised methods to sample, extract and quantify the priority chemical contaminants in seawater samples collected from major urbanised estuaries worldwide, enabling scientifically sound global comparison of the results among various estuaries. We joined this project and sampling will start during July and August