Connecting the evidence about organic pollutant sorption on soils with environmental regulation and decision-making:...

There exists an increase of review articles of pollutant sorption on soils due to the relevance of this process in environmental fate. However, this information is not used to make environmental decisions. We conduct a scoping review to identify and categorize the state-of-the-art of pesticide sorption (organic pollutant model) and decision-making studies in 2015-2020 using databases (Web of Science, Scopus and ScieLo) to detect potential gaps and create a framework that guide the connection between scientific evidence and its institutionalization. We detect research gaps (inside sorption or decision-making studies) and evidence gaps (between sorption and decision-making) from literature based on five categories to describe sorption (sorbate-sorbent system, system variables to study the sorption process, objectives pursued by authors, experimental approaches to study the sorption process, and quantification of sorption) and four topics for regulatory contexts (sponsor contextualization, descriptive information, environmentally relevant issues and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)). The gaps included (i) unrelated study designs, (ii) unreliable causal mechanisms, (iii) unrelated SDGs, (iv) lack of collaboration, (v) lack of representativeness, (vi) lack of knowledge, (vii) lack of relevant studies, and (vii) unknown causal extrapolation. Our framework connected the gaps with relevant environmental issues and common research topics on sorption studies, including suggested solutions and inclusion of lacking SDG in literature. The framework can assist the science-policy interaction, promoting cooperation for different study designs, pollutant-soil systems, and socio-environmental applications, such as environmental fate and management, risk assessment, monitoring, remediation, and local regulations.