SOFAR is involved in a number of activities, which all have the objective to improve the way we handle risk from hazardous substances in our environment. The methods are typically predictive and often associated with the authorisation and handling of hazardous substances such as pesticides or new and existing chemicals in the European Union. They include classification, labelling, risk assessment, benchmark derivation and guideline development.

SOFAR has derived national ecotoxicological soil quality criteria for more than 25 hazardous chemicals. This has been done in collaboration with the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The work has lead to several advisory tasks for national and international bodies. SOFAR is currently developing the future soil quality criteria for nickel within EU and function as advisor for various European and North American environmental protection agencies.

Within the section there is a continuous emphasis on improving the current risk assessment methodologies. This work for example, the use of QSAR and ranking methodologies as short-cut tools to classification, hazard identification, fate and risk assessment of organic compounds such as PACs. The work also include the development of refined statistical approached such as improving the current species sensitivity distributions models (SSD).