Accelerate international efforts to recognise microbial processes as essential components of ecosystem health in environmental regulations.
Explore the suitability of existing microbial endpoints for deriving guideline values for a broad range of toxicants in diverse environmental settings and regulatory contexts, including their limitations and uncertainties.
Identify priorities for validation, standardisation, and international collaboration to support confident integration of microbial endpoints into environmental risk assessment and regulation, and support efforts to bridge gaps across regions and disciplines.

Background: Significant international effort has advanced microbial endpoint approaches for deriving predicted no-effect concentrations (PNECs) for antimicrobials. However, substantial uncertainty remains regarding their broader applicability across environmental settings, contaminant types, and their ability to capture ecologically relevant microbial responses and ecosystem function.

Workshop Participants and Activity: We are targeting national and international experts in microbial ecology, AMR, environmental microbiology, ecotoxicology, environmental risk assessment, regulation, water management and environmental guideline development. The session will be highly interactive, with structured discussions and collaborative problem-solving.

Participants will:

Gain insight into the challenges and requirements to bridge the gap between microbial science and regulatory practice
Help inform ways in which existing endpoints can be modified and standardised to be applicable across diverse setting
Be invited to contribute to a journal article as a direct output of this workshop

Workshop Overview