Every 2 years, the environmental, chemical, and health research communities meet in Costa de Caparica, Portugal to showcase the latest technologies, methodologies and research advances in pollution detection, contamination control, remediation, and related health issues. Since its inception in 2015, the International Caparica Conference on Pollution Metal Ions and Molecules (PTIM) has become a biennial global forum to hear from those who protect the land, the water, and the air at all environmental scales. During past PTIM editions, we have learned about numerous efforts to develop new recovery and clean-up processes to restore the natural equilibria of our planet. Soil, land, water, and air are the key focus of efforts that will require deeper understanding and better control. We have also become aware of more and more cases of spill contamination, degradation of land and water, destruction of marine environments, misconduct by cities and enterprises, and the general disrespect of the environment shown by humans.

In 2019 and 2020, we have witnessed once again how deeply health is connected with the environment. Our world is currently experiencing an extreme, yet predictable, health crisis linked to poor stewardship of the planet. Outbreaks of zoonoses, diseases that are transmissible between animals and humans, particularly those caused by coronaviruses, have led scientists to raise repeated alerts since 2002. Indeed, it is a problem followed daily by the environment program of the United Nations (UN 2020) and the World Health Organization (WHO 2020). The global pandemic produced by the dangerous, previously unknown virus SARS-CoV-2, has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths across five continents, with equally widespread economic and social repercussions. This problem resonates all too pertinently with the title of the third Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR) special issue dedicated to the 3rd PTIM 2019—Impacts of Environmental Issues on Health and Well-being—a global pollution challenge.

A surprising upside of the COVID-19 global pandemic has been the real-time observations of the numerous environmental effects of lockdown with the world becoming visibly greener and more habitable. Unusual benefits such as cleaner air and water, lower CO2 emissions, and sudden relief from constant physical disturbance and noise were behind many beautiful pictures of wildlife on land and in the oceans. Now, the question is whether humans can consolidate these positive effects.

The degradation of our blue planet is not just an environmental problem, because it presents serious global economic and health risks too. Trade, employment, and well-being all rely on nature, starting with the quality of the food we consume, the stability of our climate and weather, the purity of the air we breathe, the control of emergent and circulating disease, and as we have discovered from the various quarantine measures around the world, essential spaces for human contact, leisure, and relaxation. Without our natural environment, there would be no life and society. The appearance of COVID-19 helped nature send us an important message: our planet is able to restore itself in the absence of persistent pressure from human activities on the land, air, and water.

The PTIM conference series is already a well-established international scientific forum in the field of environmental, chemistry, health, and well-being sciences, all hot fields in these COVID-19 times. The previous two editions in 2015 and 2017 were devoted to “New toxic emerging contaminants: beyond the toxicological effects”, (Lodeiro et al. 2019) and “Global pollution problems, trends in detection and protection” (Lodeiro et al. 2016). Now, the central theme is health. In November 2019, the third edition of this superb conference took place once again in Costa de Caparica, Portugal, keeping to our tradition of collegiality and scientific endeavor to help the environment. We listened to amazing plenary talks by Joanna Burger (USA) on the temporal trends in heavy metals in the US Atlantic Coast Estuaries (Ostrom et al. 1999; Burger 2019) and by Elena Rodica Ionescu (France) on toxicity and biosensing of environmental pollutants (Ionescu et al. 2006; Zhou et al. 2019). Jia-Qian Jiang (UK) spoke about water and wastewater treatments using double hydroxide materials (Wang et al. 2019; Jiang and Lloyd 2002), Shin Takahashi (Japan) delighted us with a presentation about the persistence of organic pollutants in the Asia Pacific Region (Monirith et al. 2003; Anh et al. 2019), and Jose Luis Gomez-Ariza (Spain) captivated us with a talk combining analysis and health problems in relation to metallomics and metabolomics in environmental metal toxicity assessment (Rodriguez-Moro et al. 2020; Gómez-Ariza et al. 2000). Making this edition even more extraordinary was the presence of outstanding keynote speakers, namely Ana Luisa Fernando (Portugal) (Souza and Fernando 2016), Erika Kothe (Germany) (Haferburg and Kothe 2007), Binoy Sarkar (UK) (Sarkar et al. 2010), Yongchun Zhao (China) (Xin et al. 2020), Jerzy Jozef Zajac (France) (Muller et al. 2019), Tamara Garcia Barrera (Spain) (Callejón-Leblic et al. 2020), Michael Gochfield (USA) (Gochfeld 2003; Burger et al. 2020), and Elisabete Oliveira (Portugal) (Marcelo et al. 2020; Oliveira et al. 2018), who explained their research covering topics as diverse as nanoparticles and food, antibiotic resistance and heavy metals, environmental clean-up applications of clay minerals, power plant wastewater metal analysis, metabolomics and the role of selenium, mechanisms of mercury and selenium toxicity, and the use of mesoporous nanomaterials and chemosensors for removing toxic agents and emerging contaminants. The picture was completed by the participation of close to 170 research fellows from five continents, contributing 70 oral talks, 20 “shotgun” presentations by young researchers, and more than 40 poster communications.

We would like to congratulate Prof. Joanna Burger, who received the Proteomass Scientific Society Career Award 2019 for her contributions to eco-toxicology, behavioral toxicology, ecology, and environmental monitoring and assessment (Ostrom et al. 1999: Burger 2019) (Fig. 1).

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Participants at PTIM 2019 in Costa de Caparica, Portugal (above), and Professor Joanna Burger receiving the Career Award Ceremony with PTIM chairs Prof. José Luis Capelo-Martínez and Prof. Carlos Lodeiro (below)

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