2023-04-24 16:40:00
Pierre Coheur, 51 and resident of Rhode-Saint-Genèse, will be the only Belgian among the 20 finalists for the Frontiers Planet international prize, the winner of which will be known on April 27. This competition rewards the best scientists whose research contributes to ensuring the future of the planet. The selection of the researcher from the Free University of Brussels is due to one of his recent studies, in connection with ammonia. This nitrogenous compound is emitted by agricultural activities and has effects both on air quality – and therefore human health – and on ecosystems.
A problem at the heart of the news, underlines Pierre Coheur. “Fertilizer spreading releases quite a bit of ammonia and this turns into small particles in the atmosphere which are transported by the wind, with very local impacts on air quality, but sometimes also cross-border ones. France has episodes of fine particle pollution in the spring which it sometimes attributes to spreading in Belgium.” This same ammonia – the other major agricultural source of which is livestock farming (cattle excrement, etc.) – when it falls into the waters and onto land, can also threaten biodiversity. “This is a very serious problem in Europe. And in the recent nitrogen crisis in Flanders, this is what was targeted: excess nitrogen in the ecosystem. Regulating these flows cannot be done without sadness.”
For fifteen years, the chemist and his team have been monitoring, using satellite data, the concentrations of ammonia in the atmosphere. Pierre Coheur was the first to map ammonia using satellites, when it was considered impossible to measure. The ULB professor was thus able to identify, from the sky, the point sources of ammonia emissions at the global level: fertilizer manufacturers and large agricultural complexes in the United States, in Eastern Europe, but also with us, especially breeding in Flanders.
Professor Coheur assures that he has “not yet” made enemies by pinning – on the basis of public data – these pollutions. “But it is likely to happen! Because the future is heading towards more satellite observations, always more precise. We hope to arrive in the years to come at a scale of one kilometer. One kilometer, it affects people’s property , to fields, individual farms… It may not please them, but it is in the philosophy of environmental monitoring.” Especially since it “raises the red flag”: “Ammonia concentrations continue to increase in the atmosphere”, despite the measures to regulate emissions taken around the world.
A very indigestible “chemical soup”: researchers warn against pollution out of control
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