Interacting environmental influences: Concepts of synergism, antagonism, and superposition

Since an enormous number of different pollutants is usually simultaneously present in a certain environmental area, it must be expected that interactions between these pollutants may occur frequently. Nevertheless, not very much is known about the combined impact of several pollutants and the environmental policy ignores these effects in defining pollution standards and limits just for single pollutants. Moreover, it is not at all clear how these effects should precisely be described. Starting from definitions of interactions between different environmental influences introduced by Ott and one of the present authors, new concepts of synergism (and antagonism and superposition) in a deterministic context will be presented. It is analyzed which properties an environmental quality index has to have in order to describe such interactions.