The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations initiated a five-day national workshop on Obsolete Pesticide Contaminated Site Risk Assessment under the Pesticide Risk Reduction in Bangladesh project funded by Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are organic compounds that are resistant to environmental degradation either through chemical, biological, and photolytic processes.
They are toxic chemicals that adversely affect human health and the environment around the world.
The capacity to characterize and assess the risk from POP’s pesticide-contaminated sites will help to reduce the challenges of contaminated sites and improper POP pesticide storage.
The training for government technicians in line with FAO Environmental Management Tool Kit (EMTK) will focus on the characterization and site-specific risk assessment of pesticide-contaminated sites. This training will use actual situations in Bangladesh.
In addition, the training module will cover the following subjects: quality control and health, safety and the environment, use of soil sampling equipment, sampling design (sampling grids and layering) analytical requirements and statistical methods.
The workshop will also equip participants to perform risk assessments.
Key tasks will include the preliminary site investigation including the use of the Rapid Environmental Assessment form, conceptual site modeling, detailed site investigation comparing against generic assessment criteria, practical case studies, and the application of sampling techniques will be demonstrated in the field.
The inaugural session of the workshop included Dr Abdul Hamid, director general of the Department of Environment as the chief guest.
Nur Ahamed Khondaker assistant FAO Representative (Program) FAO Bangladesh and Mufidul Alam, director (Deputy Secretary) of the Department of Environment of Chittagong were present as special guests.
Saso Martinov, senior technical coordinator, FAO Bangladesh presided over the inaugural session of the training.
Dr Gaius Eudoxie, an international consultant of contaminated site assessment and remediation expert will conduct the five-day national workshop with a total of 30 government technical staff from DoE, DAE, DGHS, DoF and academic institutions.