 I am providing testimony to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on advancing research to understand environmental effects on UV filters from sunscreens and the value of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in conducting a formal ecological risk assessment on such effects. My name is Jerry Davis, and I am the Assistant Regional Administrator for Habitat Conservation for NOAA Fisheries in the Pacific Islands Regional Office, and thank the academies for the opportunity to provide this input. I have been in this position for the last 18 years. I also serve as the Resource Management Advisor to the All Islands Committee of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, whose members have a great deal of interest in the sunscreen issue and having science-based guidelines to inform local water quality standards. The Pacific Islands region is bounded by the Hawaiian archipelago in the north, American Samoa and the U.S. Pacific remote islands areas in the south, and the Marianus archipelago in the west. The Pacific Islands region encompasses the largest geographical area within NOAA Fisheries jurisdiction. The U.S. exclusive economic zone within the region includes more than 1.7 million square nautical miles of ocean, roughly equal to the total EEZ around the continental United States, including Alaska. Specific land areas in our jurisdiction are Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Pacific Remote Islands of Kingman Reef, Halland, Baker, Jarvis, and Wake Islands, and Johnston and Palmyra Atolls. This region contains the most extensive and biodiverse coral reefs under the U.S. jurisdiction, and these islands are highly dependent on coastal marine resources for food, coastal protection, and livelihoods. My program administers the following and mandates for the Pacific Islands region. In 1996, Congress reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act and required federal agencies on activities that may adversely affect essential fish habitats for federal management unit species to consult with NOAA Fisheries on any proposed action that may adversely affect essential fish habitat or EFH. Management unit species are the commercially caught fish and invertebrate species as designated by fisheries councils. These include pelagic fish, bottom fish, precious corals, and crustaceans in my region. Water quality is an extremely important element to EFH in supporting coastal and marine ecosystem health and that of dependent human communities. EFH is defined as waters and substrate necessary for fish to spawn, breed, feed, or grow to maturity. Essential fish habitats are those habitats necessary to maintain fish production consistent with a stable and sustainable fishery and managed species contribution to a healthy ecosystem. In the Pacific Islands region, EFH extends from the shoreline to the outer boundary of the exclusive economic zone. This means that any federal action that will be conducted in or near the coastal environment or seaward will likely affect EFH and will require consultation with NOAA Fisheries. In the Pacific Islands, all the near shore habitat is represented by some of the most diverse and extensive coral reefs in the United States. Specific to this testimony, it is critical to recognize that water qualms can be considered part of EFH and this highlights a very strong connection between the ecosystem health and water quality. This mandate is owned by NOAA Fisheries and I am the primary signator for the consultations in the Pacific Islands region. The next mandate I wish to highlight is the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act which was created in 1934 and as amended in 1964 was enacted to protect fish and wildlife when federal actions result in the control or modification of a natural stream or body of water. The statute requires federal agencies to take into consideration the effect that water-related projects would have on fish and wildlife resources take action to prevent loss or damage to these resources and provide for the development and improvement of these resources. This law was the foundation for the concept of mitigation to avoid, minimize, enhance and compensate for impacts that has been adopted by many other regulatory mandates. Again this mandate links the value of water quality to the health of natural resources and is intended to create a partnership between the regulatory agencies and the federal action proponents to achieve the mission of the project while preserving public trust resources. The last one which I wish to highlight is the Clean Water Act and I wish to emphasize that NOAA Fisheries has kind of a unique role in this and that we have an MOU with US EPA that broadens NOAA Fisheries Authority under the Clean Water Act to use the mandate to ensure preservation of NOAA trust resources. This again directly links the health of natural resources to water quality. Clean Water Act specifically applies to coral reefs as they are considered special aquatic sites under the Act. My program also oversees NOAA Fisheries co-management role of four large marine national monuments with US Fish and Wildlife Service and the local government authority. These were all created by separate US presidential proclamations under the Antiquities Act and represent some of the largest managed natural resource areas in the world. The first of these I wish to share is the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument that was established for the purpose of protecting the rich natural resources and lands and interests in lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States within the boundaries of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. The federal land and interest in the land reserved includes approximately 139,793 square miles of emergent and submerged lands and waters of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The next monument is the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument that comprises over 480 nautical miles of the Mariana Archipelago. This marine national monument encompasses the 14 islands of the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the United States Territory of Guam and sits atop the Mariana Ridge in an area known as the Mariana Volcanic Arch. The Mariana Trench is approximately 940 nautical miles long and 38 nautical miles wide within the United States exclusive economic zone and contains the deepest known points in the global ocean. Rose Atoll Marine National Monument is located 130 nautical miles east southeast of Pongo-Pongo Harbor American Samoa and is the easternmost Samoan island and the southernmost point of the United States. This small atoll which includes the Rose Atoll National Wildlife Refuge with about 20 acres of land and 16 acres of lagoon remains one of the most pristine atolls in the world. The lands, submerged lands, waters and marine environment around Rose Atoll support a dynamic reef ecosystem that is home to a very diverse assemblage of terrestrial and marine species many of which are threatened and endangered. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument consists of Wake, Baker, Halland and Jarvis Islands, Johnson Atoll, Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll which lie to the south and west of Hawaii. With the exception of Wake Island these islands are administered as national wildlife refugees by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. This area represents one of the most widespread collections of marine and terrestrial life protected areas on the planet under a single country's jurisdiction. They sustain many endemic species including corals, fish, shellfish, marine mammals, seabirds, water birds, land birds, insects and vegetation not found elsewhere. These monuments contain a number of ESA listed species including turtles, marine mammals and corals that are all affected by water quality including those identified as an endocrine disrupting compounds that include some of the organic UV filters. Prior to this position at NOAA I was the Chief of the Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources on Guam for 23 years. That office is the natural resource agency that manages fish, wildlife and conservation law enforcement for the government of Guam. In that position it was my responsibility to ensure that water quality was maintained to support the natural resources for the public and the government of Guam. I have more than 40 years of government experience managing coral reef fisheries and coral reef habitats and there is no doubt that a sustainable coral reef ecosystem future is dependent upon maintaining water quality. Unfortunately this task has been magnified in complexity by the added stressors of climate change, sea level rise, ocean acidification, global and ocean warming and major climate shifts such as reduced rainfall and increased and more severe storms. Apologies for the long list of mandates and descriptors but is the critical and framing the management consideration for water quality. Each of these mandates is unique while having considerable overlap. On a daily basis I am faced with the challenge of evaluating considerations at the federal action level in an effort to maintain coastal fisheries and coastal habitats. This testimony is intended to provide management insight into the value of the National Academy study advancing research to understand environmental effects of UV filters from sunscreens on water quality and the value of Environmental Protection Agency conducting a formal ecological risk assessment on such effects. Water quality management is not an EPA only issue. Many entities such as the US Geologic Survey, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service, Coastal Zone Management Program, Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Defense, Department of Transportation and NOAA have meaningful roles in managing water quality. It has to be the collective effort of these entities that is recognized and organized when attempting to understand management of water quality in the US. It has been said that knowledge is power and in the regulatory world there is much to be said for this adage. Many of the mandates rely on best available science. Simply stated without the science the manager is really left guessing and often cannot define appropriate conservative measures. Logically it would seem that measures would follow the conservative and precautionary principle approach until you have the adequate and accurate science as the foundation for policy development implementation and evaluation. But in practice this fails because you cannot manage what you do not know for this reason focus science that continues to advance water quality knowledge and build thresholds and effective policy is critical in improving water quality management. Feel as important before jumping into specifics that the general context around my role in water quality management be presented. My role is different from that of local and federal EPA efforts in that my regulatory authority is tied to the health of resources fish, coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, etc. That depend upon water quality. I partner regularly with local and federal authorities to synergistically attack tackle the water quality challenges. A historical challenge has been the use of mortality to characterize the condition of resource. This is a terrible approach because the metric is telling you that it's too late for the resource in question instead of diagnosing causality and applying management interventions that could be used to achieve positive outcomes. We have many new tools that evaluate the health of living resources to make adaptive changes. Standards are slowly shifting in this direction but capacity, funding, and policy are still obstacles. I see hundreds of permits I see hundreds of permits applications annually that will impact water quality at a wide variety of levels and ways. Risk is a key consideration and has many facets. My mandates have timelines and legal boundaries. In all cases these mandates are not intended to prevent projects but rather provide a process to protect natural resources while permitting the proposed action. Yes there are rare cases where a project may not happen but even then it is usually not the mandate that stopped it but rather the requirements the project would need to meet or to get a permit. In those cases often the applicant decides it is cost prohibitive or too time consuming. It is always best well before triggering a consultation for there to be early and often coordination between the federal action agency and NOAA fisheries to work through potential obstacles and identify alternatives that can avoid or minimize impacts. This is a very effective process provided you have the science to direct things moving forward. Everything up to this point may seem off topic but the foundation is critical to understanding how the sunscreen issue fits into the bigger picture. Ideally in early scoping of a project the water quality considerations will emerge. This is where the consideration for sunscreen impacts come into play. Given the resources I am typically trying to conserve coral reefs, water quality can impact function and condition and or condition in a lot of ways. Corals are sedentary and therefore are subject to water quality spikes as well as accumulation of contaminants over time at a fixed site. Healthy coral reef populations depend on effective reproduction and larval settlement. Reproduction is driven by the synchronized release of egg and sperm during limited spawning events, short larval phases of hours to a few days and then settlement of viable larvae on hard substratta. Reduced water quality has been documented to disrupt these life stages through a variety of contaminants and mechanisms. Data are available for a number of organic uv filters that demonstrate impacts on corals and specific life history stages. We presently do not have the protocols that would track sunscreen to contamination or thresholds for what is tolerable or not. If you use to try and manage the impacts from sunscreen through water quality standards, such an approach will need to consider when samples are taken, how contaminants from sunscreen synergize with other contaminants and the many capacity limitations that are likely to come with such a proposal. For this reason, managing the product availability is likely to be the easier approach. This however also has the potential to be a huge industry litigation issue. This is where the manager for the manager things get very difficult. There are many contaminants and in most cases there is poor information about the threshold for impacts, especially at the sub-leafal levels to coral reefs. Water quality is a dynamic condition even in a perfectly natural system to constant changes in rainfall, coastal erosion, ocean conditions, wind and waves, etc. This makes describing the ambient condition very different call. Presently islands have to characterize water quality at the watershed level because of the differences in ambient condition. This unfortunately means you're going to get a range to describe water quality and you will be left with less certainty because you will be measuring changes across a range. This then becomes further complicated by how man has altered the environment and the impacts that will result. For example, the public generally does not recognize that perfectly clean freshwater discharge into the ocean is a pollutant if it represents an increase in volume of the freshwater being discharged. Many ocean creatures cannot tolerate changes in salinity. Normally coastal development efforts will try to to get freshwater off of land as quickly as possible to avoid flooding. This however then increases the volume and velocity of freshwater discharge and thus reduces salinity, increases erosion, and the transport of contaminants. Present water quality standards do not address changes in volume of freshwater so the opportunity for management is in the engineering. Here again the design target seldom focuses on this attribute that has to be considered across the spectrum of possible contaminants. Such changes in water quality can directly kill coral, prevent fertilization, reduce larval survival, or disrupt settlement, or some combination of all of these impacts, all of which reduce coral reef health. This is further complicated by the fact that the delivery of contaminants creates a soup and it is one thing to understand how a specific contaminant may affect a resource but how do multiple contaminants interact and what is the synergistic effect. In evaluating risks my mechanism for managing such impacts is limited to legal standards and measures that can be scientifically justified in altering scope of work. I fully support EPA conducting an ecological risk assessment of the effects of UV filters and sunscreen. However this is not the only risk to these systems. Understanding the soup, defining thresholds, and developing meaningful and forcible standards is what is really needed. This does not take away from the value from eliminating or more effectively managing a single stressor but reminds us to manage expectations in terms of the big picture. To manage sunscreen products from getting into the water really needs to be done at the product level because the delivery into the water is most likely directly from people entering the water. Sun exposure in the tropics is a big deal and again ideally if you want this product to go away then a reasonable affordable alternative needs to be available. UV tolerant clothing is one such option that can be cost effective and eliminate the sunscreen introduction into the ocean. My program deals with the death by a thousand cut scenario by having a role in every coastal development, coastal road project, coastal culvert, pier or coastal bridge that has a federal nexus and in the islands this is pretty much every project. However without thresholds and standards I do not have the science to avoid potential degradation of water quality in many cases. Additionally I am aware that US EPA is in the process of providing directed support to states and territories to develop meaningful water quality standards for coral reefs. It is recognized that states and territories own the responsibility to develop the water quality standard regulations but they do not have the capacity or expertise to do so. There needs to be a strong federal support in providing science and alternatives to help local governments develop such standards. There has been considerable research in recent years that has greatly improved thresholds for various water quality stressors and it seems wise to lump the concerns associated with sunscreen into a broader spectrum of risk that includes the following stressors into a more complete management approach. These include sedimentation, increased freshwater discharge, hydrocarbons, herbicides and pesticides, detergents, personal care products and heavy metals. In conclusion, completing a formal and well-designed ecological risk assessment that addresses effects at the sublethal levels is urgent and critical and adding to the science that could reduce risk while hopefully recognizing that is one stressor of many that need to be considered in improving water quality moving forward. Threshold values individually and in concert with other pollutants are necessary that include extreme rather than mean values and levels of exposure are essential. This needs federal support in assisting local governments in the building of effective management. The past we have often used mean values and oftentimes it is these spikes in the highs and lows that actually cause the most problems and those need to be addressed in developing thresholds. The fact that this issue has garnered so much national attention highlights the public's interest in water quality and I would encourage the National Academies to use this opportunity to broaden the target to more fully approach water quality management. My testimony focused on a lot of the broader spectrum of water quality. This is not intended to diminish the importance of sunscreen impacts on water quality but is intended to highlight that there are many other considerations that likely have equal or greater consideration in trying to manage water quality that should be part of this discussion. I appreciate being given the opportunity to provide a management perspective because understanding the mandates expertise and processes are really key to effective implementation. There is a tremendous opportunity right now with all the infrastructure money coming out of Congress to retrofit many systems to be more climate resilient and to improve coastal water quality. I strongly encourage the National Academies to consider this opportunity moving forward and recommend emphasis be placed on getting federal and state environmental entities to the table early to incorporate such thinking into project design and goals. It would be a tragedy to miss such an opportunity. Again I wish to thank the academies for the opportunity to provide input and welcome any opportunity in the future to continue to contribute to this effort.