From Scientific Evidence to Regulatory Action: Emerging Contaminants and Adaptive Water Governance in Brazil

Abstract

Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), including pharmaceuticals, synthetic hormones, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), bisphenol A, antibiotic-resistance determinants, and microplastics, are increasingly reported in Brazilian aquatic environments, yet the federal water-quality instruments examined here address them only in part. This review maps a structured, traceable body of evidence on CEC occurrence in Brazilian waters and examines how far that evidence has been translated into monitoring, standards, and treatment requirements. The search covered Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, and was complemented by official regulatory and institutional sources and by an exploratory Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny analysis of a broader Web of Science corpus. Evidence was prioritised according to thematic relevance, traceability, environmental occurrence, relevance to antimicrobial resistance, applied treatment performance, and regulatory significance. Pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, endocrine-active compounds, PFAS, antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs), and microplastics have been documented in specific Brazilian surface waters, source waters, estuaries, coastal environments, and some drinking-water matrices. For some compounds, site-specific concentrations overlap with or exceed effect-based or resistance-selection benchmarks; for others, the more defensible conclusion is recurrent occurrence with no corresponding Brazilian requirement for routine monitoring. The EU, by contrast, has progressively connected watch lists, periodic review, drinking-water standards, antimicrobial-resistance surveillance, and quaternary wastewater-treatment requirements. This mismatch is described here as a science-to-regulation translation gap, and it frames a five-axis adaptive regulatory proposal for Brazil centred on a dynamic national watch list, periodic review, risk-based prioritisation, coastal and estuarine monitoring, and One Health integration for ARG-related hazards.