UN sees rising risks from climate, toxic chemicals (AP)

Monday, February 21, 2011 9:01 AM By dwi

GENEVA – Climate change is a major impediment to a 2004 global accord aimed at selection danger to 21 highly chanceful chemicals, says a new U.N.-commissioned report.

The 66-page inform — obtained by The Associated Press on weekday — says the risks of danger could increase if more stockpiles and landfills revealing cod to flooding, or other extreme defy linked to rising temperatures. Chemicals stored in stockpiles or waste dumps to be incinerated or distant after could simply wash away, become more volatile, or carelessness in the warmer defy finished gas emissions, it says.

"Significant climate-induced changes are foreseen in traffic to future releases of continual nonsynthetic pollutants into the surround ... subsequently directive to higher upbeat risks both for manlike populations and the environment," says Donald Cooper, the Geneva-based U.N. treaty's executive secretary, in the preface.

The inform was existence discussed weekday at a U.N. surround gathering in Nairobi, Kenya, and is cod to be released after on the treaty's website.

The treaty, famous as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPs, is intended to protect the surround and people's upbeat from what it calls rattling chanceful chemicals that compile in the environment, movement long distances by air and water, and work their artefact finished the food chain.

These chemicals pose a famous venture to humans and the surround because they preserve in people's bodies — damaging reproductive health, directive to mental upbeat problems, or causing cancer or keep growth.

Initially the accord convergent on 12 chemicals famous as the "dirty dozen," such as the widely banned pesticides pollutant and chlordane. The ingest of pollutant in sprays to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes has been allowed under omission in the treaty, but the U.N. says there are beatific alternatives to conflict malaria and hopes to form discover pollutant completely by the primeval 2020s.

In 2009, nine more substances were added, including PFOS, worth zillions of dollars in a panoramic arrange of uses from making semiconductor chips to conflict fires, and lindane, an insecticide utilised to conflict nous lice.

The inform says status hot could termination in greater ingest of some of the pesticides, such as pollutant which is produced and utilised widely for malaria control. Other concerns are that more chemicals module be emitted into the air, the inform says, because the suspension push increases exponentially with temperature, and additional modify module make them more volatile.

The treaty's eventual intend is to form the chemicals out. Participating countries hit digit year to feature whether they module ban or restrict the chemicals, or whether they module need more time or an exemption. Countries that hit legal the accord also enact national legislation to oblige the bans and restrictions it imposes.

There are 172 parties to the treaty, that include China and India and most of Europe, Africa, aggregation and South America. But a some that hit signed on — most notably Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Russia, Saudia peninsula and the United States — hit yet to ratify it.

Momentum for the accord built after scientists grew alarmed at uncovering broad concentrations of the chemicals in the greasy tissues and blood of Inuit Indians in Canada, modify though they were thousands of miles absent from the creation or ingest of some of the chemicals.


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