PLATFORM: Platform grant Renewal: Environmental Forensics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aim of this EPSRC Platform Grant Renewal is to use the understanding of soil and groundwater contamination and remediation gained with past Research Council support including an EPSRC Platform Grant, and expand this knowledge into new areas to make a significant scientific advancement in the emerging field of Environmental Forensics. This will be done by linking a strong scientific understanding of the sources, transport and fate of environmental pollutants, their effect on the natural environment and on the built/human environment, with the vast experiences available from traditional forensic approaches to science.The purpose of the Platform Grant renewal is to underpin a 5 year research programme to fill this need and to provide to the UK a sound scientific grounding in environmental forensics which can provide the factual basis for mediated or negotiated transactions or for any public inquiry related to environmental matters; and to link this effort with other UK and International groups working in the field.Questions that environmental forensics seeks to answer includes providing a 'Legal Weight of Scientific Evidence' for: Who caused the contamination? When did the contamination occur? How did the contamination occur? How extensive is the contamination?Are the test results valid? Is there evidence of fraud? What levels of contamination have people been exposed to?