Experts involved in pesticide approvals fear that the assessments do not adequately capture cocktail effects.

Experts working on pesticide risk assessment are uncertain whether the assessments provide a complete picture of the consequences of pesticides for our environment. Some even feel that their conclusions that a pesticide poses an unacceptable risk may later be challenged in the approval process. This is shown by a new EU-funded study in which researchers interviewed 114 experts working on pesticide regulation in 31 organizations across 25 countries. They included people from public authorities and agencies involved in pesticide risk assessment in the EU—both national approval authorities and EU agencies. Growing workloads The EU has gradually developed a comprehensive regulatory system for assessing the environmental risks of pesticides before they can be approved for use, but several experts expressed concern in the study that the system has become increasingly complex. At the same time, they pointed to growing workloads and the difficulty of reflecting real-world environmental conditions in risk assessments. Several also fear that the risk assessments do not adequately capture cocktail effects, long-term and indirect environmental effects, or the impact on the landscape surrounding the sprayed field. They would therefore like to move away from assessing only one substance and one product at a time, and instead have assessments that take multiple pressures into account simultaneously, including cocktail effects from the use of several products, indirect and long-term effects, and the landscape. At the workshops held as part of the study, participants acknowledged that putting this into practice would be difficult, but many agreed that the assessments need to correspond better to reality. They also mentioned uncertainty about whether mitigation measures are followed in practice—that is, whether measures in the field, such as unsprayed buffer strips, actually work as intended and are respected by farmers. “Experts at public authorities who conduct risk assessments rarely have a voice in the public debate, even though they are the ones who work with these assessments every day. What stands out particularly clearly here is their strong commitment to scientific quality, combined with an acknowledgement that current assessment methods have limitations in terms of how well they reflect actual environmental conditions,” says one of the study’s two lead authors, James H. Williams, a researcher at the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University, in a press release. The researchers emphasize that these are personal experiences and perceptions, and that the study therefore cannot be used to conclude whether the existing risk assessment system protects the environment sufficiently or not. The experts also point out that reliable and consistent data are lacking on the quantities of each pesticide used. This makes it difficult to link environmental monitoring to individual products and verify whether the system’s predictions hold true in reality. The general uncertainty surrounding the system was evident when the experts were asked to indicate, on a scale from 1 to 5, how much they agreed with two statements: that risk assessments adequately predict the impact of pesticides on the environment, and that the procedures ensure that approved pesticides are safe. Both statements received an average score of 3.1, approximately halfway between agreement and disagreement. EU wants to simplify the rules The researchers therefore recommend clearer environmental protection objectives, better sharing and reuse of data, and stronger cooperation between regulatory authorities and EU member states. “The solution is not simply to make the assessments less detailed. It is about directing scientific efforts toward the questions that are crucial for environmental protection. Better cooperation and more systematic use of existing knowledge could improve both the quality and efficiency of the assessments,” says Johan Axelman, a senior consultant at the Department of Agroecology, in the press release. The results come amid ongoing EU negotiations on changes to pesticide legislation, including the European Commission’s omnibus proposal, which would simplify food and feed regulations. The research was conducted under the European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC), in collaboration with the Horizon Europe projects PollinERA and SYBERAC. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe.