Introduction

The registration deadline for Environmental Forensics is 21 August. Please see the Application and Fees page for how to book.

Run by the RSC's Environmental, Sustainability and Energy Forum, 'Environmental Forensics' reconstructs past and ongoing releases to the environment with the aim of resolving litigation issues surrounding the pollution. 

This first emerged as a discipline in the USA because of the environmental regulations (namely the 'polluter pays' principle) where establishing responsibility is a key step in preventing and repairing environmental damage. 

The EU is now moving in this direction with the adoption of a Directive (2004/35/EC) on environmental liability with regard to the prevention and remedying of environmental damage. This conference is timely as it will lead the way in implementing this up-and-coming directive. 

The meeting will focus on the emerging tools and techniques that are being developed for use in environmental forensics. It will focus on chemical, biological and physical methods, and will highlight the pivotal role that chemists and chemistry will play in developing new techniques and tools for use in environmental forensics. 

It will also provide a platform to bring European and US scientists together in the first international European conference of this kind. 

The programme and registration publicity brochure is available to download from this page.

The science

The programme will focus on the emerging tools and techniques that are being developed for use in environmental forensics, and will highlight the pivotal role that chemists and chemistry will play in developing these techniques. 

The conference will begin with a review of the current legal situation, and will then focus on scientific methods:

• Environmental liability (environmental liability directive, remedial and preventative action, defences, exclusions, financial tools, complementary international liability regimes, the role of the scientific expert, emerging EU criminal environmental liability issues, policy drivers, national civil liability regimes) 
• Chemical methods (temperatures, chemical signatures, new analytical tools, novel tracers, emerging contaminants, isotope analysis, chemical degradation models, quantitative chemical fingerprinting techniques)
• Statistical methods (multivariate statistics, chemometrics, source discrimination methods)
• Biological methods (emerging biological techniques, measurement and scale of marine biodiversity, molecular biotechnology, biomarkers, DNA profiling of bacterial communities, DNA fingerprinting, bacterial groups, tracking biological organisms, biological degradation models, microbiological - soils) 
• Physical methods (modelling of transport, dispersion and fate of contaminants, inverse and receptor mode models, stochastic Monte Carlo particle methods, probabilistic methods, sediment contaminant partitioning, transport, resuspension/deposition, compaction, aging)
  

Scientific organising committee

Dr Stephen Mudge (Chairman)
University of Wales, Bangor, UK

Professor Andy Ball
Flinders University, Australia
 
Professor Alan Elliott
University of Wales, Bangor, UK

Dr Robert Morrison
DPRA, USA