Tracing the Environmental Pathways of Emerging Contaminants: From Coastal and Urban Areas to Desert and Mangrove Sinks in the UAE and the Maldives

Anthropogenic contamination is impacting our modern world in unprecedented ways, starting from urban areas and impacting uninhabited remote locations. Microplastic contamination poses critical threat to important blue carbon ecosystem impacting environmental degradation and seriously affecting human health and biota. Understanding environmental, particularly atmospheric transport of microfibers is crucial because so far scientific studies have focused a lot on microplastic pollution, however, there remains significant knowledge gap in terms of in-depth understanding of the airborne pathways of contamination. There is a critical threat arising from microfibers as it has been discovered practically everywhere, not only densely populated industrialized urban centers but also from remote locations like deserts, mangrove ecosystems, uninhabited mountain catchments and even in Antarctica. The absence of significant attention to this airborne contamination amounts to severe potential damage in the blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves. Moreover, contamination affecting the ecosystems and biota can easily translate to human health hazard as multiple communities depend on blue carbon ecosystems, drawing resources and food from them. It is crucial to address this issue as microfiber contamination impacts not only the food chain, but microplastics can act as reservoirs and pathways for environmental contaminants as these tiny contaminants exhibit sponge like behaviour absorbing, concentrating, and transporting toxic chemicals and pathogens to ecosystems, wildlife, and humans. The vector effect originating from these pathways is concerning due to 1. Enabling of trophic transfer among microorganisms like zooplankton impacting the food chain 2. Long range transport impacting remote areas and transforming them into sinks for contamination 3. Human health hazards stemming from direct ingestion or inhalation of contaminants In this thesis, we present results from our analysis of microfiber contamination in the uninhabited remote deserts of the United Arab Emirates, and also investigate the threat unmanaged anthropogenic microplastic contaminants impacting the blue carbon mangrove ecosystem of the Republic of Maldives. We seek to have a broader understanding of the environmental pathways of emerging contaminants so that future work can be implemented in improving monitoring of vector effects of airborne contaminants and thus enable suitable policy formulation, development of effective strategies for mitigating microfiber contamination.