In this module you will learn about the need for carrying out an environmental risk assessment which has to be done within certain parameters which include environmental pollution which is detected by any visible impairments in the environmental quality usually seen in the deterioration of their health. When this environmental impairment is investigated it has to be identified where the pollutant is in the different phases of the environment and it could be in the air, animals, water, soil, plants and the sediment. This is important because there is a possibility that humans come in contact with the phases which in turn causes a health effect. The next question to ask is how this gets into the environment in the first place which revels that it comes from different sources that are present in the environment.
The general arrangement of a pollutant is that it starts from a source and moves to the environment and final it reaches the human receptor. The health effects of the pollutant present in the environment depends on the toxicology of these pollutants and our interface with these pollutants is called our exposure interface. The stage at which these pollutants enter the environment is called the emission level. Fate and transport is the stage between emission and exposure and it seeks to answer the question of what happens to a chemical once a once it is released to the environment before it comes in contact with a particular receptor. This is very important in the context of risk assessment of environmental pollution which is a central theme of this course. There are certain questions to ask in this context and the first is: How much exposure is safe? This is relevant because there is always going to be a certain amount of pollutants in the environment and determining safety levels is crucial and the answer to that question comes the toxicology of that particular chemical.
The next question that we are going too ask is: What is the exposure level? Which relates to the monitoring of pollutants in the environment and to answer this question we need to measure how much pollutants exist in the different constituents of the environment such as water, air and soil. When we are talking about exposure we are looking at things like for instance the air we breath, the water we drink and the presence of pollutants in these i.e. the exposure pathway and and exposure level which is the concentration of these chemicals in these. The third question is : How does the chemical enter the environment? The answer is that it comes from emission from various sources and it travels within the environment. The last question is: What happens to it when it enters the environment? The answer is that different things can happen to it one being that it can move from one place to another based on certain physical rules, it can also go through a transformation, reaction or accumulation in different by various processes such as absorption, adsorption etc .
The outline of the course is in 3 sections, the first being the introduction where we define the composition of the environment or compartments, the pollutants of concern and why we are concerned about it. The next is the criteria for pollution in terms of toxicology and the physio- chemical properties of the pollutants and regulatory standards that govern these. And this forms the frame work for risk assessment both for the regulatory arm and the public view of what is there and how regulatory agencies can make a decision on how to move forward as far as risk assessment is concerned. 
The second section deals with measurement and monitoring of environmental quality, and here we look at specific environmental qualities parameters which are the things we are interested in analyzing in the environment and the techniques for measurement or sampling this in the environment in the different phases of the environment. In this section we will look at sampling techniques, analytical techniques, and monitoring techniques for certain chemicals. And one of the important issues that we are going to consider in this section is the issue of quality control which is very important for monitoring environmental quality because most of the environmental parameters are subjected to litigation and are subjected to challenge in court, therefore the responsibility lies with the analyst in order to establish the accuracy and the validity of the results and for that reason quality control will be discussed in reasonable length.
The third section of the course deals with the fate and transport of chemicals which is a vast subject and in this context we will cover the fundamental aspects with reference to two things the first being intraphase transport where we will look at how a chemical moves within a particular phase for example its movement within water or air. We will also introduce the box model as a method in which we can model chemical concentrations for the purpose of risk assessment. We will also look at atmospheric dispersion Models in its most fundamental form which will introduce us to various factors that influence atmospheric dispersion. The second aspect is interphase transport which means the exchange of different chemicals across different interphases in the environment such as air- water interphase, air-solid which is mainly the soil interphase and water-solid interphase which is the water and soil or sediment interphase.
We will also look at different scenarios in which we can encounter these kind of transport problems and how we can model chemical concentrations, chemical transport, and how we can assess risk based on chemical concentrations across these kind of interphases.
Objectives of the course
1. To present an overall view of the multimedia environmental quality and fate and transport with reference to the interaction of pollutants with the environment.2. With a larger objective of doing an environmental risk assessment the estimation of the chemical environmental quality either by modelling or by measurement of both is central to the aspect of risk assessment. 3. Therefore we will give you a holistic approach to the environmental pollution assessment via measurements or modelling.
Background / Pre-requisites
1. Fundamental knowledge of simple engineering mathematics2. Energy and mass balances3. Fundamentals of thermodynamics4. Any science/engineering student in their 3rd / 4th year or PG students (Mtech, M.Sc., MS, PHD)5. Environmental professionals with an engineering/science degree