Environmental Forensics

Abstract

Environmental forensics has emerged because relevant stakeholders can be compensated if contamination events or damages to the environment or health are committed, underpinned by legislative frameworks. The ability to prosecute based on environmental forensics requires rigorous record-keeping and data that is defendable in court and limited to data obtained from laboratories using standard accredited analytical methods, techniques, and instrumentation. The critical questions required to answer questions pertaining to the environment are typically associated with understanding the extent of the damage, the duration and residencies of the pollution, and the responsibilities of the environment based on the regulatory context. To answer environmental forensic problems, a number of variables are required to be known: chemical fingerprinting, fates of chemicals, transport modelling, hydrogeological and limnological surveys, operational legacy, and current or historical data, representing a highly multivariate issue. Multivariate being many variables, analytes of interest, matrices, and data associated with the problem at hand. We will discuss modern and emerging rapid-field deployable systems coupled with chemometrics, which can be translated to gaining information and chemical fingerprinting based on environmental contamination (e.g., metals, nanoplastics, oils, pesticides, perfluoralkanes), their identification, quantification, and source determination in a modern capacity using chemometrics and modern methods of statistical analysis to support environmental contamination applications.