Experts from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) have held meetings with policy makers as part of a bid to raise awareness of the effects of excess phosphorus entering the environment, and to drive measures to tackle this.

The Centre hosted a meeting of the UNEP-convened Global Partnership on Nutrient Management (GPNM) last month. The partnership is made up of scientists, government officials, non-governmental organisations and industry representatives, and seeks to tackle the amount of nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers and other nutrients entering natural ecosystems, where they can do harm (pollution associated with these nutrients includes loss of biodiversity, destruction of aquatic habitats and air pollution with greenhouse gasses).

The GPNM has set up a Phosphorus Task Team (PTT), which gathered for the first time at the September meeting. The team met to develop an action plan for better phosphorous management, and propose ways of engaging with different stakeholders in different global regions in a bid to preserve phosphorus and improve its use.

Speakers highlighted the lack of global scale policy for phosphorus, which is a fossil resource as well as a potential environmental pollutant. CEH scientist Will Brownlie also discussed the global scale of phosphorous pollution at the Royal Society of Edinburgh last month.